Diplomacia de Lula - Rubens Ricupero

À sombra de de Gaulle: uma diplomacia carismática e intransferível
A política externa do governo Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010)
Rubens Ricupero
Revista Novos Estudos CEBRAP, n. 87, julho 2010

O modelo ao qual mais se assemelha a diplomacia de Lula é o do general de Gaulle, embora muito provavelmente a semelhança não seja consciente e sim, como se dizia nos filmes antigos, ela se deva à mera coincidência.
De fato, a política externa brasileira dos últimos oito anos possui as seguintes características que foram tradicionalmente associadas à diplomacia gaullista:

1. É fortemente pessoal e carismática, inseparável mesmo da biografia e da personalidade do chefe de Estado.
2. Mais do que ditada por ideologias, é, acima de tudo, intensamente nacionalista, buscando aproveitar oportunidades de acumular prestígio internacional mediante o reconhecimento externo da grandeza do Brasil e de sua aspiração de igualdade com as maiores potências.
3. Sua principal marca externa é a contestação ao padrão de hegemonia do sistema internacional simbolizado pelos Estados Unidos e os outros membros permanentes do Conselho de Segurança, em relação aos quais a diplomacia brasileira manifesta constante independência, não hesitando em patentear de público suas divergências.
4. Busca estimular alianças e arranjos que se oponham ao sistema de poder preponderante como se constata na aproximação com a Turquia no acordo sobre o enriquecimento do urânio iraniano, na chamada “parceria estratégica” com o Irã, expressão repetida em relação à França de Sarkozy (os armamentos), a China, a Rússia, a África do Sul, o grupo dos BRICs.
5. Exprime-se, como no exemplo gaullista, no intento de criar uma zona de influência exclusiva no perímetro mais próximo da América do Sul, com exclusão dos Estados Unidos, como tentava fazer de Gaulle na Europa Ocidental.
6. O estilo é crítico e não-consensual, lembrando os tempos de Jânio Quadros, do qual afirmava seu chanceler, Afonso Arinos, que o presidente acertava no atacado e errava no varejo. Os exemplos abundam: as declarações em Cuba sobre a greve de fome de prisioneiros de consciência; a crise financeira de responsabilidade de “louros de olhos azuis”; as acusações de fraude nas eleições iranianas comparadas à briga de torcidas no Fla-Flu e assim por diante. Internamente acentua a ruptura, não a continuidade, se vincula claramente a uma facção partidária e a uma corrente ideológica, não se preocupando em edificar um consenso nacional em torno de temas de interesse nacional perdurável.
7. Demonstra relativa indiferença pela falta de resultados econômicos e comerciais tangíveis e imediatos em negociações e acordos bilaterais ou regionais, dispondo-se a sacrificar interesses e direitos materiais a objetivos políticos no relacionamento com vizinhos e terceiros em geral (gás da Bolívia, reivindicações paraguaias, medidas protecionistas argentinas, prioridade exclusiva na negociação multilateral da Organização Mundial de Comércio).
8. Revela escassa sensibilidade aos temas clássicos do idealismo e dos valores morais nas relações internacionais: direitos humanos, defesa da democracia, interferência internacional para impedir o genocídio e crimes contra a humanidade, o esforço de evitar a não-proliferação nuclear, preocupação com os efeitos planetários e globais da mudança climática.
9. Afasta-se do ideal republicano de institucionalização e impessoalidade, aproximando-se dos modelos carismáticos de liderança personalizada típicos da América Latina, exceções raras em democracias maduras (como a exceção gaullista).
Partindo das características esquemáticas acima resumidas, tentarei captar as linhas gerais que conferem inconfundível perfil à diplomacia desenvolvida durante o arco de tempo que cobre quase a inteira primeira década do século XXI.

1) Diplomacia pessoal e carismática
O apogeu a que atingiu o prestígio do Brasil no mundo não se deve exclusivamente a um só governante ou a um único fator. Ele resulta de uma conjunção excepcional de oportunidades externas favoráveis com uma situação interna de estabilidade política e econômica sem precedentes. O esforço cumulativo de sucessivos governos desde o retorno do país à ordem constitucional democrática foi responsável por muitas das razões da percepção favorável ao Brasil e que, embora recentes, tendem a se tornar estruturais: a estabilidade macroeconômica; a expansão do mercado interno de consumo; a consolidação do regime democrático; a alternância normal no poder, sem violência, de correntes e partidos diferentes, mas quase sempre próximos do centro do espectro ideológico; a moderação e o pluralismo da vida política, religiosa, cultural; o avanço em algumas reformas sociais; o desaparecimento da ameaça de golpes militares e a subordinação das Forças Armadas ao poder civil; a baixa intensidade de violências ou tensões raciais, religiosas, culturais.
Outras são conjunturais ou pessoais. Fernando Henrique Cardoso desfrutou de considerável prestígio e admiração em razão de suas realizações como intelectual, de sua decisiva contribuição à tarefa de estabilização da economia, da relação estreita que havia estabelecido com estadistas como Clinton e Blair. No período do governo atual ocorreram fatos novos ou se acentuaram tendências anteriores que atuaram todas no sentido de reforçar a imagem positiva do país. A descoberta da gigantesca reserva petrolífera do pré-sal seguramente aumentou a importância estratégica e as perspectivas econômicas futuras do Brasil. Da mesma forma agiram a aceleração do crescimento, o relativo êxito com que se enfrentou a crise financeira, as referências elogiosas de organizações internacionais a programas sociais como o bolsa-família, a atenuação da pobreza e da desigualdade.
O presidente Lula potencializou e multiplicou essas condições propícias ao simbolizar de certo modo, pela sua história pessoal, o exemplo de ascensão do país como um todo. Sua identificação com as grandes causas sociais de luta contra a fome e a pobreza, o carisma de personalidade autoconfiante, a vocação inata à negociação foram elementos adicionais para reforçar a percepção externa da emergência do Brasil como ator global.
Contudo, por excesso de protagonismo o sucesso indiscutível da diplomacia presidencial se colou de forma tão inseparável ao carisma do presidente Lula que se tornou demasiado personalista e intransferível. Na antevéspera da sucessão, o debate sobre a orientação internacional que mais convém ao Brasil e não apenas a um projeto de poder pessoal ou de uma facção não pode evitar o exame dessas alegações. É a partir delas que se poderia separar, na linha de ação atualmente seguida, o que reflete as realidades e os interesses do país como um todo do que não passaria do efeito real, mas efêmero, da sedução exercida por uma liderança carismática desacompanhada de resultados objetivos e concretos.

2) Projeção nacional e busca de prestígio
A evolução nos anos recentes do contexto político e econômico internacional se mostrou extremamente propícia à aspiração de países como o Brasil de adotar e executar uma política externa de crescente afirmação.
Foi justamente nessa primeira década do século que se assistiu, em termos políticos globais, ao aparecimento de espaço favorável à afirmação de um novo policentrismo, isto é, à possibilidade de que atores de poder intermediário (Brasil, Índia, África do Sul, Turquia) tomem iniciativas autônomas em temas globais antes reservados às potências preponderantes (os cinco membros permanentes do Conselho de Segurança da ONU: EUA, China, Rússia, Reino Unido, França). O policentrismo se viabilizou aos poucos, à medida que o unilateralismo da estratégia de George W. Bush na resposta aos atentados de Onze de Setembro, sobretudo a invasão do Iraque, a doutrina do “preemptive attack” e do Eixo do Mal, se revelaram incapazes de resolver com êxito o engajamento militar não apenas no Iraque, mas também no Afeganistão. O conseqüente enfraquecimento relativo do poder e do prestígio americanos sofreu o desgaste adicional da crise econômico-financeira, levando à aceitação pelo próprio governo Obama dessa alteração na realidade internacional.
O cenário econômico foi marcado no início (2003-2008) por fase sem precedentes de expansão da economia mundial (preços das commodities, liquidez financeira, juros baixos), seguida por crise financeira aguda que desorganizou e debilitou de preferência as economias ocidentais de capitalismo avançado, reforçando os efeitos da emergência econômica da China e precipitando a aceitação do G-20 como instância substituta do G-7 na coordenação da economia global.
Na América Latina, registra-se um vazio de liderança, provocado pela acentuação do desvio da atenção dos EUA para outras regiões prioritárias do ponto de vista de segurança, em particular o Oriente Médio e a Ásia e pelo apagamento temporário do México e da Argentina. Ao mesmo tempo, aumentaram em intensidade as divergências e a heterogeneidade de regimes em decorrência das experiências radicais de refundação encarnadas na Venezuela de Chávez, na Bolívia de Morales e no Equador de Correa, complicando as perspectivas de efetiva integração econômica ou de colaboração político-estratégica.
As duas primeiras tendências se reforçaram uma à outra, abrindo possibilidades inéditas para atores intermediários favorecidos por condições de estabilidade político-econômica e dotados de capacidade de formulação e iniciativa diplomáticas como o Brasil no começo de 2003. Superados os solavancos econômicos iniciais, o governo Lula foi o afortunado herdeiro de uma Nova República que havia consolidado a democracia de massas, a coesão social interna e a estabilidade dos horizontes econômicos.
Inspirada pelo desejo de aproveitar as oportunidades surgidas, sobretudo em âmbito global, a política externa do governo Lula se desdobrou desde o início ao longo de quatro eixos principais:
1) a obtenção do reconhecimento do Brasil como ator político global de primeira ordem no sistema internacional policêntrico em formação, o que normalmente se vem traduzindo pela busca de um posto permanente no Conselho de Segurança da ONU, mas pode assumir eventualmente outras modalidades de realização como a participação nos recém-criados agrupamentos do G-20, BRICs e IBAS.
2) A consolidação de condições econômicas internacionais que favoreçam o desenvolvimento a partir das vantagens comparativas brasileiras concentradas na agricultura, objetivo que se expressa primordialmente na conclusão da Rodada Doha da OMC.
3) A dimensão reforçada emprestada às relações Sul-Sul, ensejada naturalmente pela forte e visível emergência da China, Índia, África do Sul, pela retomada do crescimento africano e expressa na proliferação de foros de contactos, alguns superpostos aos gerais (IBAS, BRICs em parte), outros originais, (AFRAS, ASPA, Brasil-CARICOM etc).
4) A edificação de espaço político-estratégico e econômico-comercial de composição exclusiva sul-americana (implicitamente de preponderância brasileira no resultado, se não na intenção), a partir da expansão gradual do MERCOSUL.
Dependendo do tema o balanço dos resultados alcançados pela diplomacia mostra que os avanços variam, mas, talvez com exceção do mais fácil, o eixo Sul-Sul, em nenhum dos casos os objetivos foram realmente atingidos. Nem sempre, contudo, a frustração das metas se deve a culpas e deficiências da política exterior brasileira. De forma um tanto simplificada pode-se afirmar que nos dois primeiros eixos, o Brasil quer, mas não pode; no da América do Sul, o governo pode, mas não quer.
Conselho de Segurança da Organização das Nações Unidas: Na Organização das Nações Unidas e na Organização Mundial de Comércio, a capacidade brasileira de influenciar os acontecimentos não é suficiente para resolver os impasses. Por mais que o governo se esforce, não se logrou até agora produzir consenso para reformar o Conselho de Segurança, nem para concluir a Rodada Doha, quanto mais para fazê-lo de acordo com os interesses do Brasil. Quer dizer: é mais um problema de insuficiência de poder ou vontade política, não só do Brasil, mas dos demais, que de falta de política apropriada de parte da diplomacia nacional.
Isso não significa que não se haja feito nada. Ao contrário, em ambos os foros a atuação brasileira nos havia posicionado até recentemente de maneira favorável a tirar bom partido de eventual retorno de condições propícias a um avanço. É inegável que o Brasil conquistou neste momento uma situação diferenciada em relação a outros aspirantes latino-americanos como o México e a Argentina, distanciando-se como o favorito para ocupar uma cadeira que vier acaso a ser destinada à América Latina. Reflexo principalmente do próprio crescimento econômico e estabilidade brasileiras, a percepção diferenciada deve ser também creditada ao ativismo e senso de oportunidade da atual política externa.
As negociações na Organização Mundial de Comércio (OMC): Se houve, portanto, diferenças inegáveis em relação ao governo anterior na ênfase dada ao Conselho de Segurança, bem como nas oportunidades antes inexistentes sobre agrupamentos que só surgiram agora como o G-20, os BRICs, e outros, existe nas negociações da OMC muito mais continuidade do que mudança na linha negociadora seguida pelos governos brasileiros ao longo de muitos anos, primeiro no GATT, mais tarde na sua sucessora, a Organização Mundial de Comércio. Mesmo as eventuais alterações se afiguram quase sempre desdobramentos naturais impostos por novas fases da Rodada Doha, originando-se nos governos passados muitas das posições e alianças utilizadas na OMC.
O recurso à abertura de contenciosos exemplares como o dos subsídios ao algodão contra os Estados Unidos (posteriormente contra os subsídios da União Européia ao açúcar) é uma boa ilustração da continuidade de política de Estado, pois havia sido iniciado pelo governo do presidente Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Ademais, data igualmente da administração do ministro Celso Lafer a decisão de estabelecer na estrutura do Itamaraty um setor de contencioso provido dos recursos capazes de empreender uma ação de extraordinária complexidade técnica e jurídica como foi a dessa indiscutível vitória da diplomacia comercial brasileira.
Outro exemplo da continuidade básica na política do Brasil nas negociações comerciais multilaterais é o da criação do Grupo dos Vinte da OMC, inovação tática que se deveu à iniciativa, acolhida pelo chanceler Celso Amorim, do então embaixador do Brasil na OMC, Luiz Felipe de Seixas Corrêa, que havia sido justamente o secretário-geral do Itamaraty na gestão anterior, do ministro Lafer.

3) Contestação da hegemonia e afirmação da independência
O Brasil há muito tempo se empenha numa linha diplomática que favorece a emergência de um sistema decisório mundial mais equilibrado e multipolar, ao mesmo tempo em que defende ciosamente a autonomia e independência de suas opções. O que tem variado no tempo é o estilo mais ou menos construtivo dessa postura. A evolução do atual governo registra uma tendência gradual a um discurso acentuadamente mais militante e crítico em temas como o do impasse das negociações da Rodada Doha, do comportamento norte-americano diante do golpe de Honduras, do acordo militar entre os Estados Unidos e a Colômbia e, de modo incalculavelmente mais importante, na questão do programa nuclear iraniano.
A recente guinada da atitude brasileira em relação a um regime como o de Teerã, objeto de sucessivas sanções do Conselho de Segurança, conduziu o Brasil perigosamente perto de uma rota de colisão com os Estados Unidos em dois assuntos correlatos de importância crucial para o governo Obama: a legitimação de regime recém-saído de eleições contestadas e a não-proliferação nuclear, uma das prioridades principais da nova Administração. Ao aceitar a troca de visitas no mais alto nível com nação geralmente acusada de desafiar as sanções, violar a democracia e os direitos humanos, negar o Holocausto e tentar adquirir armas atômicas, contrariando o Tratado de Não-Proliferação Nuclear, o país tomou decisão de implicações negativas junto a uma parcela importante e influente da opinião pública americana e mundial. Não se percebe bem quais os ganhos que a diplomacia brasileira esperar colher de iniciativa que se reveste de alguns aspectos brilhantes como jogada diplomática, mas que arrisca deixar um saldo pesado de ressentimentos e desconfianças.
O acordo com o Irã, mediado junto com a Turquia, teria sido um passo relevante, talvez até decisivo, para valorizar a postura brasileira (e turca), caso tivesse sido coordenado e harmonizado com o grupo de “Cinco mais Um” (os cinco membros permanentes do Conselho de Segurança mais a Alemanha). Para isso, ele deveria ter sido precedido e acompanhado de consultas a esses países, dos quais teria de depender a implementação do acordo no Conselho. Ficou evidente, contudo, pela reação dos integrantes do grupo, que o resultado das tratativas em Teerã apareceu como um fato consumado a ser imposto aos demais, já que a solução negociada deixou de cobrir pontos vitais para dissipar a desconfiança. Ademais, a própria atmosfera de triunfo desportivo que cercou a assinatura na capital do Irã, com os patrocinadores erguendo os braços em sinal de vitória, realçou no gesto os aspectos de desafio, não de conciliação, não contribuindo naturalmente para fazer apreciar o acordo pelos destinatários da manobra.
O episódio revela, ao mesmo tempo, o potencial e os limites hoje existentes para a afirmação de atores intermediários e a lição a extrair do ocorrido é que o potencial terá possibilidades maiores de se traduzir em frutos concretos na medida em que as iniciativas assumirem natureza mais construtiva. O mérito do esforço brasileiro permanece, mas amputado do êxito completo que se poderia haver esperado, deixando até rescaldos de má vontade e suspeitas que poderão complicar o atendimento das aspirações nacionais ao Conselho de Segurança.
Os resultados indecisos da empresa aconselhariam no futuro escolher com critério cuidadoso as oportunidades de atuar. Convém sempre avaliar o balanço de custos e benefícios potenciais, esforçando-se a agir de maneira cooperativa com outros atores, de modo discreto, sem excessos ou jactâncias geradoras de resistências e reações hostis.
Essa, aliás, deve ser a linha de orientação a ser seguida nos trabalhos do Conselho de Segurança, no seio do qual o Brasil deve se firmar pelos méritos de uma diplomacia que represente uma força de moderação e equilíbrio, de conciliação e aproximação de adversários. Sem ansiedades ou ativismos desnecessários, essa é a melhor postura para assegurar que o nome do Brasil se imponha consensualmente como aspirante irrecusável no processo de tornar o Conselho mais representativo das novas realidades internacionais.

4) Encorajamento a alianças e grupos alternativos
Os novos grupos de coordenação diplomática: Os esforços de articular agrupamentos diplomáticos inéditos com a Rússia, a Índia e a China (BRICs) ou com a Índia e a África do Sul (IBAS) oferecem a vantagem do fato consumado: pelo próprio peso específico, sem qualquer necessidade de delegação dos outros, o Brasil tornou-se efetivamente o representante da América Latina nesses grupos. Não por acaso, eles reúnem os membros permanentes do Conselho de Segurança (China e Rússia) e os aspirantes a essa posição que têm em comum a circunstância de não serem aliados dos Estados Unidos na Organização do Tratado do Atlântico Norte (OTAN). Seria uma espécie de clube dos “candidatos naturais” ao reconhecimento de um status internacional mais elevado em cada um dos três continentes: Índia (Ásia), África do Sul (África) e Brasil (América Latina). Os foros Sul-Sul servem para realçar que o Brasil é o ator mais “global” entre os latino-americanos, muitos dos quais confinados a uma diplomacia meramente regional.
O desafio que o Brasil terá no futuro de superar consistirá em contribuir para formular uma plataforma de ação conjunta que unifique o comportamento de países de interesses tão heterogêneos, condição para que aportem algum valor adicional ao que já vem sendo feito pelo G-20. Todos esses grupos de geometria variável são expressão do mesmo fenômeno: a procura por instituições e mecanismos de coordenação e de governança global, diante do bloqueio da possibilidade de reforma dentro do processo legitimador por excelência da Carta da ONU, como seria ideal e desejável. Até o presente, no entanto, esses agrupamentos não se mostraram capazes de ir além de documentos declaratórios genéricos, sem impacto perceptível naquilo que seria sua finalidade natural: conseguir que os quatro BRICs atuem em uníssono, com uma plataforma de ação comum, no aprimoramento da governança global.
O Grupo dos 20: Essa tarefa tem ficado virtualmente por conta do G-20, cuja emergência como instância política suprema de coordenação macroeconômica foi, sem dúvida, uma das mais impressionantes transformações da ordem internacional dos últimos anos. A incorporação súbita de novos atores a um processo decisório até então protegido com exclusividade pelas grandes economias avançadas representou, ao mesmo tempo, a imposição de uma exigência nascida da crise financeira mundial e o reconhecimento de modificação na correlação das forças econômicas que já estava em curso. Para o Brasil o salto foi ainda mais significativo por nos habilitar a aceder ao âmbito das grandes decisões financeiras e monetárias a que antes só comparecíamos como réus de moratórias e atrasos de pagamento.
Em estreita articulação com os demais BRICs, o Brasil se empenhou no seio do grupo em contribuir para proporcionar aos países emergentes maiores poderes e responsabilidades em todas as instâncias deliberativas na área monetária e financeira. Esse esforço visou não só as instituições de Bretton Woods, mas também a incorporação dos emergentes no Foro de Estabilidade Financeira (FSF), transformado em Conselho de Estabilidade Financeira (FSB) de Basiléia, assim como em outros foros que congregam supervisores e reguladores do sistema financeiro.
Uma iniciativa de implicações relevantes foi a decisão dos BRICs de conquistarem virtual poder de veto (blocking minority) ao fazerem um aporte de US$ 92 bilhões (US$ 50 bi da China e US$ 14 bi de cada um dos três, Brasil, Índia e Rússia), mais de 15% do total, à nova estrutura criada para socorrer as economias em crise, o chamado New Arrangements to Borrow (NAB). O poder desse modo adquirido ganha relevo particular quando se considera que o volume da facilidade criada (US$ 590 bi) é mais do que o dobro do que os US$ 250 bi das quotas regulares/capital do Fundo Monetário Internacional.
A questão que ora se coloca é de assegurar a contínua relevância do G-20 como foro central das decisões no momento, oxalá próximo, em que as crises atuais, concentradas na Europa, tiverem afinal sido superadas. Isso significa que o Brasil se deve preparar a contribuir com competência intelectual e técnica à tarefa de edificar uma economia nova, menos sujeita a crises catastróficas periódicas e evitáveis. Não bastará ao país se limitar a uma atitude de vigilância e resistência à tendência das maiores economias avançadas no sentido de reverterem os avanços de democratização do processo decisório uma vez se retorne à normalidade. Será indispensável que, além da atitude vigilante, o governo ganhe efetiva capacidade propositiva no debate sobre macroeconomia mundial e instituições de regulamentação e supervisão.

5) A América do Sul como zona de influência
Na América do Sul, o Brasil não pode tudo, mas pode algo. Em tese, a diplomacia brasileira teria tido condições de agir mais ou de agir de modo diferente. Por exemplo, entre o Uruguai e a Argentina, para ajudar, como facilitador, dois vizinhos prioritários e membros do mesmo acordo de integração a superarem o conflito em torno da instalação de empresas de papel em solo uruguaio. O Uruguai e a região do Rio da Prata são, incontestavelmente, as áreas do mundo onde o Brasil possui mais longa tradição de envolvimento, melhor conhecimento direto das situações e mais numerosas e legítimas razões para desejar um desenvolvimento pacífico.
Justifica-se, antes e depois do pior momento da crise argentino-uruguaia, que o governo brasileiro se empenhe em papel construtivo de aproximação entre os mais íntimos de nossos dois vizinhos. Sem necessidade de estimular a proliferação de organizações e burocracias redundantes, bastaria reativar o Tratado da Bacia do Prata, injustamente esquecido e que possui competência temática em problemas de vizinhança como os que ainda opõem o Uruguai à Argentina.
A mesma abordagem se aplica à necessidade de corrigir a parcialidade ocasional e a quase permanente omissão do atual governo em relação a outros conflitos sul-americanos, voltando a observar rigorosa eqüidistância e não-ingerência em eleições ou processos políticos internos de vizinhos, o que tem sido cada vez menos freqüente nestes tempos de diplomacia de afinidades partidárias e ideológicas. O corolário da confiança que decorreria de tal postura seria a credibilidade para um esforço brasileiro de pacificação entre a Venezuela e a Colômbia ou de reconciliação desta última com o Equador, todos vizinhos próximos, com os quais mantemos relações de colaboração e cordialidade.
Um instrumento idôneo para impulsionar a colaboração de interesse recíproco de potencial desaproveitado seria o Tratado de Cooperação Amazônica, que reúne todos os países da metade setentrional da América do Sul, inclusive as duas Guianas independentes. Representa a única estrutura que possibilita uma coordenação dos esforços para melhor proteger os complexos e ameaçados biomas dessa gigantesca região e para uma abordagem integrada dos rios amazônicos, a maioria dos quais possuem suas nascentes nos países vizinhos.
Diplomacia gestual: A contradição entre a busca incessante de resultados de prestígio nos agrupamentos aparecidos em época recente como o G-20 e os BRICs contrasta com o desempenho sensivelmente mais mitigado no eixo de direta influência brasileira, o imediato entorno da América Latina e do Sul. Não que tenham faltado aqui exemplos do talento aparentemente inesgotável de criar foros novos (o Conselho de Defesa) ou de rebatizar com nome novo grupos pré-existentes (como a Comunidade de Nações Sul-Americanas ou CASA, transfigurada em União de Nações Sul-Americanas ou UNASUL). Não se deixou até de estabelecer uma “OEA sem Estados Unidos ou Canadá”, curiosamente iniciativa do México, o primeiro país latino a se associar no NAFTA aos dois gigantes desenvolvidos do hemisfério norte num acordo de livre comércio e talvez por isso preocupado em atenuar seu isolamento em relação aos ibero-americanos.
Esse tipo de diplomacia (não só do Brasil) merece talvez o qualificativo de “gestual” no sentido de que a ausência de condições objetivas ou de resultados palpáveis é menos importante do que o gesto em si mesmo. Às vezes se assemelha a uma fuite en avant: o aumento da dose de remédio que não está dando certo, um pouco como a anotação feita por célebre orador peruano à margem de parágrafo de um discurso – argumento débil, reformar el énfasis.
Nesse domínio, tanto o governo atual como o futuro deveria preocupar-se menos em multiplicar estruturas novas sim em tornar efetivas e operacionais as estruturas ou processos já existentes, sobretudo quando se justificam por razões concretas e válidas. É o caso da Iniciativa para a Integração da Infraestrutura Regional Sul-Americana (IRSA) do governo passado, que tem avançado sem alardes publicitários e conserva toda sua atualidade uma vez que o problema da falta de uma integração das redes de transporte na América do Sul continua a ser um dos maiores obstáculos à efetiva integração das economias. A mesma afirmação se aplica aos tratados já citados acima, o da Bacia do Prata e o de Cooperação Amazônica.
Venezuela e MERCOSUL: O ingresso da Venezuela no MERCOSUL é um dos exemplos de decisões de graves implicações na América Latina sobre os quais até hoje a opinião pública tem dificuldade em compreender a motivação brasileira e o próprio desenrolar do processo decisório. A impressão que se colheu no momento do convite formulado por Nestor Kirchner, quando a Argentina exercia a presidência do bloco, foi de que ele não havia sido precedido de consultas entre todos os membros, nem de avaliação cuidadosa das implicações. Uma análise criteriosa teria provavelmente demonstrado a falta de sentido em promover a entrada de país que só poderia aumentar os problemas agudos de que sofre o grupo, entre eles, a ausência de compatibilidade entre orientações macroeconômicas, adicionando um complicador ideológico, o socialismo do século XXI, à economia de mercado dos demais. Se já existe impaciência crescente com a pesada máquina decisória da união aduaneira e as dificuldades, supostas ou reais, que ela cria para a negociação de acordos comerciais com terceiros, a adição de governo atritado com inúmeros outros como o venezuelano apenas dificultaria ainda mais os impasses.
Detentor do maior peso específico no grupo teria sido normal que o Brasil ponderasse que as adesões a acordos comerciais de extrema ambição como as uniões aduaneiras demandam longo processo prévio de negociação técnico-comercial, como ocorre na Organização Mundial de Comércio. Não seria necessário antagonizar o regime de Chávez, nem invocar argumentos de ordem ideológica, mas simplesmente lembrar e fazer respeitar um princípio elementar de negociação comercial. O governo poderia ter feito algo nessa linha, mas preferiu não fazer. A questão não seria tanto de falta de poder, mas da falta de vontade para exercer tal poder da forma mais adequada para defender os direitos e promover os interesses do Brasil, utilizando o diferencial em nosso favor.
Questões polêmicas: Sendo essa a região do mundo onde a influência brasileira, no passado e no presente, sempre se fez sentir de modo mais forte e imediato, o natural é que nela se tivessem concentrado as maiores realizações da diplomacia. É igualmente nessa área que a diplomacia brasileira terá de demonstrar sua superior capacidade para superar obstáculos, persuadir recalcitrâncias, edificar obra concreta. Paradoxalmente, entretanto, até agora, a maioria das divergências sobre falhas e equívocos da política exterior se refere a assuntos sul ou latino-americanos.
As prioridades do Brasil deveriam coincidir naturalmente com esses problemas e a efetividade da diplomacia tem de ser avaliada pela capacidade que revele de encaminhar solução para as seguintes questões: a) o persistente fracasso em resolver os contínuos atritos e contenciosos com a Argentina em matéria comercial; b) a passividade e falta de iniciativa corretiva frente ao descrédito do MERCOSUL; c) a incompreensível renúncia a acionar os meios pacíficos do direito internacional em defesa de direitos brasileiros atropelados em incidentes como o da violação boliviana de tratados e contratos sobre o gás; d) a imprudente ingerência nas eleições bolivianas e paraguaias por motivo de simpatias ideológicas; e) a parcialidade na campanha contra o acordo militar entre a Colômbia e os Estados Unidos, em contraste com a omissão diante de iniciativas de compra de armamentos de Chávez ou de suas freqüentes provocações aos colombianos; f) a falta de senso de medida e equilíbrio em relação ao golpe hondurenho, ao mesmo tempo em que se mantinha incoerente complacência frente a regime controvertido como o cubano, sem falar no iraniano.
Muitas dessas dificuldades nos foram impostas nesses últimos anos por uma adversa evolução que se processou em direção oposta à convergência de valores e modelos de organização político-econômicos registrada na Europa e no mundo após o fim do comunismo. Na América do Sul, ao contrário, a integração e até o bom convívio normal têm sido dificultados por processos radicalizados de refundação e lideranças polarizadoras de tensões e conflitos, internos e externos. Uma leitura realista da situação exigiria reconhecer os limites do que é possível fazer com esses governos. Abriria espaço, por outro lado, a uma diplomacia alternativa mais sintonizada com os países que adotam posturas econômicas e políticas centristas mais próximas às nossas. Não por acaso, esses países são aqueles que, pelo tamanho ou desempenho econômico, ofereceriam oportunidades mais promissoras: México, Chile, Colômbia, Peru, Uruguai.
Unasul e Conselho de Defesa: Não obstante a evidente ausência dos requisitos objetivos mínimos, a diplomacia atual insistiu em edificar um espaço político-econômico que utilizasse não o conceito de América Latina, mas apenas o da América do Sul. Em projetos de caráter territorial justifica-se optar por esse gênero de integração exclusiva, como sucede com a referida Iniciativa para a Integração da Infraestrutura Regional Sul-Americana ou IIRSA. É muito mais difícil estender o critério a áreas mais amplas e complexas como as do comércio e da defesa, que dependem não da contigüidade territorial, mas da compatibilidade de visões políticas e econômicas. Em contexto regional de aumento da divergência de modelos, de desconfianças e animosidades, projetos como o da Unasul ou do Conselho de Defesa correm risco considerável de passarem à história como meras expressões de uma diplomacia gestual cujo potencial se esgota em reuniões que constituem um fim em si mesmo, sem maiores conseqüências.
O mínimo que se deveria exigir de tais grupos é que lograssem o que a Argentina, o Brasil e o Chile tinham consolidado no Acordo do A.B.C., há mais de um século, a saber, a reafirmação da mais estrita observância do princípio de não-ingerência nos assuntos internos dos vizinhos e o compromisso de não permitir a presença ou ações de movimentos armados nas zonas fronteiriças.
Objetivo como esse teria de constituir a pré-condição básica de qualquer união de países, parecendo, entretanto, fora do alcance de uma organização que se intitula com alguma pretensão de “União de Nações Sul-Americanas”. Para que serve o Conselho de Defesa se não somos sequer capazes de adotar uma posição comum a respeito das guerrilhas das FARCs? Sem esse mínimo dos mínimos, não se concebe que a Colômbia, país que luta há meio século contra guerrilhas e narcotraficantes, aceitasse abrir mão da assistência militar dos Estados Unidos. Por desejável que seja evitar a presença militar americana no continente não se vê bem que alternativa existiria para que Bogotá obtivesse os recursos e o know-how de que necessita. O Brasil, impotente diante do controle exercido pelo narcotráfico em morros do Rio de Janeiro e longe de poder oferecer assistência militar e policial a quem quer que seja, dispõe de escassa autoridade para censurar os colombianos por buscarem quem os ajude.
A questão das preferências comerciais: É presumir demais da própria importância querer exigir de um vizinho ameaçado por problemas de guerrilha e de narcotráfico que escolha entre nós e os Estados Unidos em matéria de defesa contra tais flagelos. Situação idêntica prevalece no âmbito econômico e comercial no caso daqueles países latinos e sul-americanos – e não são poucos – para os quais o mercado norte-americano representa 50% ou mais do destino de suas exportações. O Brasil não tem evidentemente condições de rivalizar com os EUA como mercado importador ou fonte de investimento, uma vez que há décadas acumulamos com quase todos os sul-americanos saldos comerciais crescentes. Nem mesmo dentro do MERCOSUL o país conseguiu desempenhar o papel de mercado impulsionador do crescimento do Uruguai e do Paraguai.
Não surpreende, assim, que até no âmbito restrito da América do Sul, três países médios e talvez não por acaso os de melhores fundamentos e desempenho econômico, o Chile, o Peru e a Colômbia, tenham optado pelos acordos de livre comércio com os EUA. Inviabilizou-se assim a possibilidade de uma zona comercial puramente sul-americana, gerando ao mesmo tempo para as exportações brasileiras o perigo de tratamento discriminatório frente às de procedência americana.
As negociações da ALCA não conseguiram infelizmente produzir um terreno de equilíbrio e entendimento entre as expectativas demasiado ambiciosas de Washington e concessões norte-americanas, especialmente em agricultura, que atendessem aos interesses do Brasil e do MERCOSUL, proporcionando-nos no mercado americano tratamento preferencial equivalente ao dos outros. Na ausência do acordo de livre comércio, a prioridade de qualquer governo brasileiro futuro deve ser a de negociar algum arranjo alternativo que preencha o vácuo desvantajoso da falta de preferências em que se encontram presentemente os produtos brasileiros. Essa prioridade comercial vale tanto para o mercado dos EUA, no qual estamos sendo discriminados pelas preferências outorgadas aos produtos oriundos de acordos da ALCA quanto para os mercados dos latinos (como o Chile ou o México), onde enfrentamos a concorrência favorecida das exportações norte-americanas.
Relações com os EUA: Esse vazio ilustra a persistente incapacidade de alcançar com os Estados Unidos uma relação madura e construtiva da qual um elemento indispensável teria de ser uma base de crescentes vantagens mútuas no comércio e na complementação de cadeias produtivas e exportadoras. Tentou-se durante a administração de George W. Bush revitalizar essas relações, superando o impasse da ALCA com uma colaboração em torno do etanol. Além de obviamente estreito demais para fundamentar uma relação mais vasta, o esforço não foi capaz de sobrepujar o protecionismo em relação ao etanol de milho americano.
É paradoxal que no governo Obama o relacionamento com Washington principie a denunciar sinais de um alargamento das divergências em torno de uma agenda negativa em expansão: o manejo do golpe de Honduras e agora da situação pós-eleitoral naquele país; o acordo de cooperação militar da Colômbia com os EUA; as responsabilidades americanas pelo impasse da Rodada Doha e ultimamente o complexo de questões relativas ao Irã, a seu programa nuclear e à maneira de tratar com o regime iraniano.
A tensão oriunda da multiplicação de tais desencontros começa a encontrar expressão na imprensa e no Congresso dos EUA e só tem sido disfarçada na área oficial pelo reconhecimento do papel moderador do Brasil num contexto sul-americano conturbado por personalidades mais abrasivas e provocadoras que as dos nossos líderes.

6) Estilo e fim do consenso em diplomacia
A crise do consenso em política exterior: Não faltam, por conseguinte, questões que vêm erodindo o relativo consenso multipartidário que prevalecia na véspera de fundação da Nova República, a julgar pelo discurso de fins de 1984, no qual Tancredo Neves declarava: “(...) se há um ponto na política brasileira que encontrou consenso em todas as correntes de pensamento, esse ponto é a política externa levada a efeito pelo Itamaraty.” Transcorridos 25 anos dessas palavras, a simples leitura dos jornais ou o acompanhamento dos debates no Congresso são suficientes para indicar que esse consenso deixou de existir.
A crise do consenso brasileiro é produto não só das questões substantivas da política externa propriamente dita, mas também da “política interna” da diplomacia, isto é, a maneira como ela é formulada e apresentada à opinião pública, a seus formadores, aos políticos e o modo como é percebida por esses últimos. Dessa perspectiva, a responsabilidade maior cabe a comportamentos concentrados nos seguintes fatores que afetam a possibilidade de edificar consensos em política exterior: a ênfase na ruptura, em lugar da continuidade; o excesso de protagonismo e glorificação da liderança pessoal de Lula; a politização partidária e ideologização da política externa.
Ênfase na ruptura: Os dirigentes atuais, destacando-se nisso o presidente, não souberam em geral resistir à tentação de se atribuir o crédito total pelos eventuais êxitos que tiveram. Buscaram fazer crer que era novo e sem precedentes tudo o que empreendiam. De maneira geral, Lula e seus colaboradores no Itamaraty tiveram a possibilidade de admitir e valorizar, nos assuntos que apresentavam autêntica continuidade com o passado, a parcela maior ou menor, que teriam acaso herdado de governos anteriores, mas preferiram apropriar-se todo o mérito em nome do governo atual e de seu partido.
Naturalmente é opção sem surpresa, mas seguramente não será a melhor em termos de construção de consensos. Há, com efeito, nessa matéria uma espécie de “trade off”: não é possível monopolizar o crédito para o governo e seu partido e esperar, ao mesmo tempo, que os injustamente excluídos do reconhecimento se sintam partes integrantes dessa política.
Excesso de protagonismo: São traços indiscutíveis desta fase política brasileira o abuso do protagonismo e o excesso de glorificação personalista, criando a impressão de que se depende cada vez mais das qualidades de desempenho do líder supremo. Aliás, a política externa não constitui exceção no panorama geral de um governo, cujos ministros são quase anônimos.
Em democracias maduras sempre se procurou imprimir à diplomacia um caráter aberto à participação efetiva mesmo da oposição. Nos Estados Unidos, por exemplo, o modelo ideal de que se tem nostalgia até nossos dias é o do “consenso bipartidário” com os republicanos no início da Guerra Fria. Na França de Sarkozy, qualquer que tenha sido sua motivação, o presidente foi buscar no partido socialista seu ministro de assuntos estrangeiros e numerosas personalidades convidadas a cumprirem missões internacionais de relevo. No Brasil de hoje seria difícil encontrar algum exemplo dessa tendência salutar.
Interferências partidárias e ideológicas: O discurso de Tancredo deixava claro não ser uma política externa qualquer a que mereceria consenso, mas apenas a “levada a efeito pelo Itamaraty.” Não se tratava da política dos militares no poder, de um determinado governo ou facção, mas de uma política de Estado, acima das disputas internas e a serviço da nação. Convém recordar que a etimologia da palavra “partido” significa fragmentado, rompido, quebrado, parte do todo que é a nação. Quem faz diplomacia de partido mostra indiferença pelo esforço de converter tais ações em causas autenticamente nacionais.
É incompatível com esse objetivo a existência de uma “diplomacia paralela” do Partido dos Trabalhadores junto a governos ou movimentos ideologicamente afins, exercida por meio de contactos fora dos canais diplomáticos e emissários como o assessor de política externa da Presidência da República. Tal divisão de “esferas de influência” converteu-se em causa de complicações, de que foram exemplos as incursões na política interna da Venezuela, em momentos de tensões naquele país; a falta de isenção ideológica com que se tem acompanhado a campanha eleitoral em países vizinhos; a parcialidade citada antes em relação ao acordo militar da Colômbia com os EUA; o contraste entre as reações ao golpe hondurenho e a complacência diante de Cuba ou do Irã e numerosos outros episódios.
Não há evidências de que essas afinidades ou simpatias tenham demonstrado eficácia ou utilidade perceptível para encaminhar soluções satisfatórias quando surgem questões espinhosas como as que opuseram o Brasil à Bolívia ou ao Equador. A diplomacia paralela do PT parece, assim, servir mais para contaminar desnecessariamente a política exterior com suspeitas ideológicas de que para qualquer propósito prático.
Mais do que um valor perfeito e absoluto, inatingível na prática, o consenso sobre diplomacia é objetivo desejável sempre que possível de edificar mediante compromissos razoáveis com a oposição, sem sacrifício de valores mais altos. Um grau maior ou menor de honesta divergência pode ser até saudável desde que não derive de uma subordinação instrumental da política externa a ganhos partidários ou ideológicos internos. Nesse caso, renuncia-se à possibilidade de assegurar a continuidade de políticas de Estado que devem, em princípio, fazer apelo não a facções, mas ao conjunto dos cidadãos.
Nesse particular, seria difícil encontrar melhor explicação das vantagens potenciais da busca do consenso do que as palavras com que o barão do Rio Branco explicava porque se afastara em definitivo da política interna e não tinha querido aproveitar sua imensa popularidade para lançar-se candidato a presidente: “(...) seria discutido, atacado, diminuído, desautorizado (...) e não teria como Presidente a força que hoje tenho (...) para dirigir as relações exteriores. Ocupando-me de assuntos ou causas incontestavelmente nacionais, sentir-me-ia mais forte e poderia habilitar-me a merecer o concurso da animação de todos os meus concidadãos” (grifado por mim).

7) Insuficiências de resultados comerciais
No momento em que escrevo, o comércio exterior brasileiro vive uma aguda crise de competitividade, manifestada no acelerado declínio do saldo na balança comercial e no alarmante agravamento do déficit em conta corrente. A gravidade da situação é acentuada pela tendência aparentemente irreversível para a erosão das vantagens competitivas dos produtos manufaturados e a crescente concentração das exportações em número sempre menor de commodities e artigos de baixo nível de elaboração derivados de recursos naturais.
Não é este o lugar apropriado para discutir os desequilíbrios macroeconômicos que se encontram na raiz do problema, a conjuntura de crescimento puxado quase exclusivamente pelo consumo do governo e dos particulares, a baixa poupança, o investimento insuficiente e a inelutável contrapartida de todo esse quadro, que consiste no aumento da dependência em relação à poupança externa e aos influxos financeiros de fora. O que não se pode esconder é que a taxa de câmbio representa papel fundamental na deterioração das contas externas, não sendo possível cogitar de solução duradoura para os problemas do comércio exterior em abstração da questão cambial.
É verdade que, além do câmbio, outras deficiências estruturais afetam duramente a capacidade brasileira de concorrer nos mercados mundiais com os asiáticos e outras estrelas do comércio contemporâneo. O altíssimo custo do capital, a sufocante carga de tributos, a burocratização e baixa qualidade da regulamentação governamental, a péssima infraestrutura de transportes e portos, enfim, o conjunto dos fatores que formam o “custo Brasil”, responsável pelo alto custo de transação em nosso país. Todos esses elementos se situam em área de competência muito além do alcance da política exterior, mas é inegável que sem a solução parcial ou completa dessas permanentes causas da baixa capacidade brasileira de competir não é muito o que a diplomacia comercial poderá fazer deixada a si mesma.
Existem entre nós ilusões desmesuradas sobre a capacidade que têm as negociações comerciais ou os acordos bilaterais e/ou regionais de alterar essa ingrata realidade competitiva. Não se percebe o bastante que negociações e acordos, mesmo quando bem sucedidos e executados, podem no máximo gerar oportunidades de exportação. Aproveitar essas oportunidades vai depender, como sempre, da capacidade de oferta de produtos de qualidade e preço competitivos nos mercados, o que passa por câmbio favorável acima de tudo e os demais fatores citados.
Por essa razão, no futuro o governo terá de primeiramente equacionar e encaminhar os problemas que ora afetam negativamente a taxa cambial e os outros componentes da competitividade, o que exigirá o envolvimento pessoal e constante do Presidente da República a fim de que se possa de fato dispor de um mecanismo eficiente de coordenação de todos os órgãos relevantes dos quais depende uma boa condução do comércio exterior.
Diante do persistente impasse nas negociações da Rodada Doha, não se poderá deixar de conduzir um exame criterioso da conveniência de remanejar as prioridades da diplomacia comercial do Brasil. Não se trata de recomendar que se desconheça o valor insubstituível da Organização Mundial de Comércio como o foro por excelência para avanços em temas sistêmicos como o dos subsídios agrícolas ou para a solução quase-judicial de contenciosos, mas de indagar até que ponto se justifica uma concentração excessiva nas expectativas criadas pela Rodada Doha.
A verdade é que a indústria brasileira, que sofre de problemas crônicos de competitividade, revela escasso entusiasmo pelos ganhos potenciais da Rodada, temendo que os benefícios da eventual redução nos picos tarifários em produtos sensíveis (têxteis, calçados, artigos de couro) sejam praticamente monopolizados pelos chineses e outros asiáticos
A compensação que esperamos receber em agricultura precisa também ser submetida a um crivo analítico rigoroso. Os subsídios agrícolas, é claro, somente serão reduzidos de modo apreciável nas negociações multilaterais, sendo essa a razão principal que aconselha nosso contínuo engajamento. Para entidades representativas como a Confederação Nacional da Agricultura o problema maior não viria tanto dos subsídios, mas sim das barreiras de acesso aos mercados externos. O Banco Mundial chegou à mesma conclusão: os ganhos de acesso seriam mais substanciais que a diminuição dos subsídios, indicando a experiência que, em matéria de conquista de acesso, os acordos bilaterais são geralmente mais eficazes que negociações longas e complicadas como as da OMC.
Portanto, paralelamente à continuação do empenho brasileiro na Rodada Doha, conviria devotar tempo e esforços comparáveis a iniciativas menos ambiciosas, nas quais é possível alcançar resultados mais imediatos e tangíveis. Se nos últimos oito anos, em lugar de apostar tudo em Doha, tivéssemos dedicado mais energia e atenção a remover ou reduzir barreiras fitossanitárias às nossas carnes, frutas e vegetais frescos em mercados específicos, talvez tivéssemos agora resultados mais alentadores.
Não será fácil obter acordos desse gênero com grandes países, mas recomenda-se, com espírito aberto, explorar todos os caminhos comerciais possíveis, procurando não concentrar nossa diplomacia comercial exclusivamente no âmbito da OMC. Caso passemos a ter condições para uma política comercial menos defensiva e capaz de oferecer compensações, seria factível encetar negociações de acordos com atores médios como preparação para vôos mais ambiciosos em relação aos grandes mercados.
No que tange ao futuro do MERCOSUL, o governo não terá como evitar um reexame da conveniência de manter ou não a União Aduaneira e/ou a Tarifa Externa Comum (TEC). Talvez seja viável trabalhar com fórmula de meio-termo: uma União Tarifária, formal ou informal (alinhamento voluntário como na ASEAN), com flexibilidade para negociações externas em separado, sem a sobrecarga burocrática das exigências para uma efetiva União Aduaneira. Tal situação não seria radicalmente diferente da realidade atual, faltando apenas a flexibilidade para negociações externas dentro de critérios a definir.

8) Escassa sensibilidade aos valores
Um dos aspectos em que a linha internacional de Lula mais se confunde com a política externa gaullista é na invariável subordinação da promoção dos direitos humanos e objetivos universais como a luta contra o aquecimento global, as armas de destruição maciça e o genocídio a uma estreita e egoísta consideração de interesses de curto prazo. A opinião pública brasileira está ciente dos exemplos mais comentados dessa insensibilidade, tais como expressos pelo próprio presidente durante a visita à Havana - a apologia da repressão do governo cubano contra dissidentes, a assimilação de greves de fome de desesperados prisioneiros de consciência a ações de criminosos comuns – ou a descrição de “estratégica” da relação com o regime iraniano que, dias antes da visita do presidente brasileiro, havia enforcado vários dos participantes das manifestações contra as fraudes eleitorais.
Tem sido muito menos divulgado, fora de círculos especializados, o comportamento no Conselho dos Direitos Humanos da ONU em Genebra da delegação do Brasil, que se vem notabilizando pela cumplicidade com a sinistra aliança responsável pelo bloqueio de todas as tentativas de investigação ou pressão para alívio das vítimas de violações maciças dos direitos mais elementares. É sugestivo que em direitos humanos o Brasil se afasta de sua proclamada identificação com os valores latino-americanos. Em posição contrastante com a da Argentina, do Chile, do México, que honram as melhores tradições da América Latina, o governo brasileiro se tem alinhado nessa matéria aos mais notórios violadores como Cuba e Paquistão.
Fazendo causa comum com regimes empenhados em debilitar o cumprimento dos compromissos de direitos humanos, o governo brasileiro se tem desonrado a si mesmo e ao país ao colaborar, por omissão absenteísta ou ação bloqueadora, na vergonhosa tarefa de obstruir o correto funcionamento do Conselho. Ademais, é uma triste ironia que o governo responsável por esse comportamento atraiçoe a memória dos que se sacrificaram na resistência ao regime ditatorial em nosso país ao concorrer ativamente para proteger e favorecer os autores dos piores atentados aos valores humanos nos dias atuais, na Coréia do Norte, em Sri Lanka, no Congo, no Irã, no Sudão do genocídio de Darfur.
Ao preferir ganhos diplomáticos imediatistas aos valores universais, o governo brasileiro se torna culpado de dupla contradição. De um lado, suscita dúvidas sobre a sinceridade das causas que afirma sustentar internamente como, por exemplo, ao decretar o controvertido plano nacional de direitos humanos. Do outro, enfraquece e desmoraliza o próprio fundamento de seu recém-adquirido prestígio internacional, que deriva da conjunção de duas imagens, a do Brasil e a de Lula, ambas associadas a valores humanos como a paz, o combate à fome, à injustiça e à miséria.
Há por detrás disso uma contradição mais profunda, que nasce da falta de clareza em relação aos objetivos e valores finais que inspiram o esforço do governo em conquistar reconhecimento e respeito internacionais. Já se disse acima que a diplomacia atual se caracteriza pela incessante busca de oportunidades de acumular prestígio. O prestígio é um dos elementos componentes do poder, do que hoje se denomina “soft” ou “smart power”, o poder suave, brando, o poder inteligente, a capacidade de persuadir pelo exemplo e os argumentos, em contraposição ao poder contundente dos armamentos ou da coerção econômica.
A singularidade do Brasil entre os países de grande território e população é justamente o de ser o único que só dispõe a rigor da primeira modalidade de poder. Dos quatro BRICs, por exemplo, apenas o Brasil não é potência atômica nem militar convencional. Isso se deve, no fundo, a um conjunto de razões geográficas e históricas que nos beneficiaram com situação invulgar de segurança. No passado 1º de março, aniversário do fim da Guerra da Tríplice Aliança, comemoramos 140 anos de paz ininterrupta com dez vizinhos, conquista provavelmente sem paralelos entre países de porte e número de vizinhos comparáveis aos nossos.
O próprio presidente Lula defendeu a tradição de autocontrole e moderação no que tange à resposta a dar a ações adversas da Bolívia, do Equador, do Paraguai, embora confunda cordura com a renúncia a acionar os mecanismos jurídicos de defesa de direitos. Ora, o fato de não ser potência nuclear nem militar, de não se comportar como os demais, longe de impedir, foi o fator que habilitou o Brasil a se tornar credor de crescente prestígio internacional. Esse patrimônio intangível de prestígio nasce em nosso caso não da potência, mas da cultura da paz. Naquilo que não é reflexo do tamanho e da economia, a irradiação brasileira é fruto do exemplo, da encarnação de valores morais. Por que então destruir essa reputação ao proteger e se confundir com os inimigos do reforço mundial dos direitos humanos?
A mesma pergunta se aplica ao nosso atual papel de concorrer para o enfraquecimento do regime internacional de não-proliferação nuclear ao recusar, sem motivo convincente, a adesão ao Protocolo Adicional do Tratado de Não-Proliferação (TNP). Se o governo é sincero em acatar a adesão ao Tratado, efetuada pelo governo passado, se não tenciona violar a proibição constitucional de armas nucleares, por que adotar atitude cômoda de crítica aos defeitos inegáveis do TNP, sem utilizar sua reconhecida capacidade de proposição diplomática para sugerir modos de fortalecê-lo?
O general de Gaulle era coerente em sua estratégia de se inspirar apenas na grandeza da França, desafiando o mundo com os testes nucleares para edificar seu arsenal. O Brasil, porém, parece vacilar entre perseverar no caminho pacífico que lhe valeu o prestígio até agora ou passar a agir como aqueles que sempre criticou com razão. A não ser que a ambigüidade sobre proliferação esconda uma reserva mental para eventual reviravolta futura, em linha com o programa de armamentos dispendiosos como o submarino nuclear, os aviões caça e outros projetos recentes que evocam o fantasma do retorno aos sonhos de Brasil Grande Potência da ditadura (aliás, o argumento da soberania invocado às vezes para justificar os votos brasileiros no Conselho de Direitos Humanos é exatamente o mesmo brandido pelos militares no passado).
A miopia de um falso “realismo” concentrado em ganhos de prestígio sem maior substância acaba por levar ao desperdício de oportunidades de construir algo muito mais valioso. É o que se constata na área onde o Brasil teria melhores condições para reclamar o status de potência, o de potência ambiental. Graças às características da matriz energética e do seu baixo custo potencial de redução de emissões, o país poderia, sem afetar interesses econômicos relevantes, tornar-se símbolo de uma política pró-ativa como primeiro grande país em desenvolvimento a aceitar metas de redução. Em lugar de servir de instrumento à China e à Índia na resistência a avanços nas negociações sobre mudança climática, o governo brasileiro deveria voltar a desempenhar, como fez durante a grande conferência do Rio de Janeiro em 1992, o papel de intermediário e facilitador de um acordo histórico entre as nações avançadas e os países em desenvolvimento, o que significaria de fato uma vitória diplomática consagradora não só para o Brasil, mas para toda a humanidade.

9) Limitações do personalismo carismático
Não se discute que a diplomacia do governo Lula tenha possibilitado elevar exponencialmente o prestígio internacional do Brasil. Examinada, contudo, pelo critério rigoroso dos problemas resolvidos ou dos ganhos concretizados o balanço é indeciso, pois o prestígio não foi suficiente para realizar as aspirações brasileiras em relação ao Conselho de Segurança ou nas negociações da OMC. Tampouco logrou contribuir para pacificar as relações entre vizinhos sul-americanos, reforçar a convergência, não a divergência adicional em matéria de valores e práticas democráticas, superar os atritos comerciais recorrentes com a Argentina, revitalizar o MERCOSUL, celebrar acordos comerciais para neutralizar a falta de preferências no continente e no mundo, em outras palavras, para produzir resultados concretos e tangíveis.
Essa constatação chama a atenção para os limites do prestígio nas relações internacionais. Trata-se de elemento valioso, uma condição necessária na maioria dos casos, mas não suficiente. O prestígio não se deve transformar em objetivo narcisista em si mesmo, algo que se esgota na própria autogratificação. Somente terá sentido se for posto a serviço de projeto de nação que maximize a segurança, a paz, o bem-estar dos cidadãos, não metas nebulosas como a “grandeza” desacompanhada de benefícios concretos e valores morais.
À medida que o governo conseguiu superar sua insegurança inicial acentuou-se infelizmente a tendência à personalização na figura de Lula dos êxitos internos e exteriores. Com isso o Brasil se aproximou dos modelos de poder pessoal e populista que têm proliferado na América do Sul, com os quais, aliás, o presidente não esconde sua afinidade. É possível por isso que, desse ponto de vista, a experiência do governo Lula passe à história como um retrocesso em relação aos avanços em termos de institucionalização e impessoalidade do poder registrados na Nova República.
Jamais como agora teve o Brasil uma política externa tão inseparavelmente identificada, para o bem e para o mal, com a figura do Chefe de Estado, nem mesmo na época do Imperador D. Pedro II, quando a diplomacia já se distinguia pela institucionalidade. Mais até do que na insuficiência de ganhos efetivos, a principal falha da diplomacia do período Lula se situa justamente na ambigüidade dos valores morais e humanos, reflexo inevitável das contradições e incoerências de seu protagonista central. Há incontestavelmente muitas coisas de valor na política exterior do presidente que merecem ser valorizadas e preservadas ou, quando necessário, corrigidas e complementadas. Não se inclui entre elas a confusão entre personalidade e política, negação do espírito republicano e obstáculo a uma diplomacia que traduza não um projeto de poder pessoal ou de uma facção, mas o mais amplo consenso possível da nação como um todo.

São Paulo, em 29 de maio de 2010.

Financial Times - a big survey about Brazil

Com desculpas pela "enormidade" do post, mas é o conteúdo completo do caderno especial do Financial Times sobre o Brasil.
Destaco apenas um trecho de síntese:

"One of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s great merits as president was to deepen and defend at home the orthodox economic policies launched by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, his predecessor, even though such policies might well have differed from the ideological positions he held while in opposition. Even so, Lula da Silva led his party to adopt measures whose results are now celebrated around the world, and with good reason. Roughly 10m of Brazil’s 192m people joined the ranks of the middle class between 2004 and 2008, and since 1990, poverty levels have halved.
Yet that has not been the case in the near abroad. In meetings with regional leaders, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez or Fidel and Raul Castro in Cuba, Lula da Silva has often enthusiastically praised the merits of socialism – even though such ideas are notably absent back at home.
Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, makes a trenchant point. “Mr Lula da Silva has been very good to Brazilians, but very bad for millions of his neighbours,” he says. “Those despots who have the luck to count themselves among the Brazilian president’s friends, even as they ruin their own countries while Brazil progresses, know they can count on his help or, at least, complicit silence.”
Either way, the country’s clout in international affairs is now an acknowledged fact. Still, it will be interesting to see whether Brazil continues its rainbow approach, which embraces Iran, among others, when Lula da Silva’s presidency ends this year and the country loses the shelter of his charisma, charm and prestige.
Yet despite the important successes of the “new Brazil”, many of the failings of the “old Brazil” remain. Most of them will be on view when the world comes to Brazil during the 2014 World Cup and the Olympic Games two years later.
The state remains remarkably inefficient and its bureaucracy a barrier to business: Brazil ranked 129th out of 183 countries in the World Bank’s latest Doing Business report, worse than Nigeria. The need to boost productivity is especially important given the currency’s recent strength, which threatens to bury local companies with cheap imports."
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Enjoy...

Special Survey Brazil
Financial Times, 29/06/2010

Sumary:
South America’s giant comes of age
Who will lead Brazil?
Good fortune helps strengthen Brazil’s economy
Why Brazil must try harder
Brazil’s challenge: fuel for a nation
Brazilian banks return profits with interest
Bumper harvest as professional farming takes hold
End of the road for Brazilian farmers’ competitiveness?
Infrastructure investment puts Brazil on road to prosperity
Will Brazil be ready to play host to the world – twice?
Auto industry speeds ahead as Brazilian demand spikes
Massive dam project comes with sizeable obstacles
The long road to rainforest conservation
The power set: five influential Brazilians
A nation’s destiny - Lula

South America’s giant comes of age
By John Paul Rathbone
If the rise of Brazil was cast as a childhood story rather than a dry economics tract, the fable might go something like this.
Once upon a time, there was a skinny boy who was bullied at school. Every time there was a fight in the playground, he seemed to end up as the punchbag. The boy rarely complained, even though his sorry state did not match the glorious fate about which he often daydreamed. That just seemed to be the way things were.
One day, a new teacher arrived, bringing with him some new games for the classroom. These playthings distracted the big boys, and the fighting stopped. The skinny boy used the calm to do exercises, recommended by his canny stepmother, who also fed him a special soup to make him strong.
All good things come to end, however. The games broke, as they always do, and tempers flared again in the playground. This time, however, the big boys no longer bullied the skinny boy. He had become lean and fit, while they had grown fat and clumsy. Instead of pushing him around, they even seemed to look up to him. Standing in the school yard, blinking in the sun, the boy revelled in his new status. Would it last? He wanted to make sure it would.
The skinny boy is, of course, Brazil. His bullies are the financial markets of developed economies, the new games are the soothing palliative of the noughties credit boom, and the latest school-ground fight is the global financial crisis. His stepmother is China, the special soup he ate the commodity boom that has boosted Brazil’s economy, and his exercises represent the macroeconomic stabilisation policies Brazil put in place in the mid-1990s. The result, in this simple tale first told by Brazilian commentator Ricardo Amorim, is the new Brazil: a slightly gangly adolescent, standing tall amid the world community, not fully grown into its new stature but confident and eager to make its mark.
Ever since its separation from Portugal and the establishment of an independent empire in 1822, Brazil has viewed itself as destined for greatness. Sometimes, the outside world has reinforced this view. Dozens of books published over the past two centuries have recognised Brazil’s potential, most famously Stefan Zweig’s Brazil: Land of the Future. The country is “destined undoubtedly to play one of the most important parts in the future development of our world”, Zweig wrote in 1941 shortly after arriving in the country, fleeing war-torn Europe.
And yet for much of its history, Brazil – like so many other continent-sized countries, including its emerging peers, Russia, India and China – has been inward looking, more concerned with its own progress and development than projecting itself abroad.
Margaret Thatcher, the former UK prime minister, was not the last world leader to proclaim with surprise, as she supposedly did the first time she saw the serried ranks of São Paulo’s skyscrapers: “Why has nobody told me about this city before?” Perhaps her advisers had, but Brazil did not impinge on her consciousness. After all, it was only eight years ago, in 2002, that Brazil attended its first G8 conference, and that was just as an observer.
Indeed, as Leslie Bethell, editor of The Cambridge History of Latin America, notes, it is only in the past 20 years or so, since the end of the cold war and the passing of the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, that Brazil has begun to play a role in regional and world affairs commensurate with its size, natural resource wealth and financial and economic heft. This has been partly thanks to Brazil’s new-found confidence, which in turn rests on something it has never enjoyed before: political and economic stability.
In the corporate world, “new Brazil’s” projection of itself is most obvious in well-known consumer brands, from the Havaiana flip-flops now worn on millions of people’s feet to the Embraer executive jets flying over your head. Less glamorous Brazilian companies, slower to make their presence known abroad, are now raising their profile too. Vale, the world’s largest iron-ore producer, recently snapped up one of the world’s last great iron-ore mines from under its rivals’ noses. JBS, the world’s largest meat producer, last year bought Texas chicken company Pilgrim’s Pride. Earlier this month, Gerdau, the steel company, took full control of its US subsidiary in a $1.6bn deal.
In financial services, Banco do Brasil, South America’s biggest bank by assets, is starting to expand abroad – not to hoover up assets, but to service Brazilian companies on their foreign forays. It recently paid roughly £500m ($740m) for Banco Patagonia of Argentina.
This all makes good strategic sense. Past domestic crises left Brazilian companies with a legacy of conservative financial management and mostly sound balance sheets. Thus they were well placed to take advantage of opportunities thrown up elsewhere by the financial crisis. If they have a dominating position in the local market, now is a good time to look overseas.
Meanwhile, foreign companies are turning to Brazil not just for the size of its booming domestic market, but also as a platform to its Spanish-speaking neighbours. At General Motors technical centre in São Caetano do Sul, engineers join rolling, global conference calls to discuss new automotive products being designed for the growing number of emerging market consumers. Fiat’s factory in Brazil, for example, is the second biggest in the world.
The country’s new confidence can also be found, more controversially, in its friends-to-all foreign policy.
One of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s great merits as president was to deepen and defend at home the orthodox economic policies launched by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, his predecessor, even though such policies might well have differed from the ideological positions he held while in opposition. Even so, Lula da Silva led his party to adopt measures whose results are now celebrated around the world, and with good reason. Roughly 10m of Brazil’s 192m people joined the ranks of the middle class between 2004 and 2008, and since 1990, poverty levels have halved.
Yet that has not been the case in the near abroad. In meetings with regional leaders, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez or Fidel and Raul Castro in Cuba, Lula da Silva has often enthusiastically praised the merits of socialism – even though such ideas are notably absent back at home.
Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, makes a trenchant point. “Mr Lula da Silva has been very good to Brazilians, but very bad for millions of his neighbours,” he says. “Those despots who have the luck to count themselves among the Brazilian president’s friends, even as they ruin their own countries while Brazil progresses, know they can count on his help or, at least, complicit silence.”
Either way, the country’s clout in international affairs is now an acknowledged fact. Still, it will be interesting to see whether Brazil continues its rainbow approach, which embraces Iran, among others, when Lula da Silva’s presidency ends this year and the country loses the shelter of his charisma, charm and prestige.
Yet despite the important successes of the “new Brazil”, many of the failings of the “old Brazil” remain. Most of them will be on view when the world comes to Brazil during the 2014 World Cup and the Olympic Games two years later.
The state remains remarkably inefficient and its bureaucracy a barrier to business: Brazil ranked 129th out of 183 countries in the World Bank’s latest Doing Business report, worse than Nigeria. The need to boost productivity is especially important given the currency’s recent strength, which threatens to bury local companies with cheap imports.
“If the real continues to strengthen as it has, by the 2016 Olympics, Brazil won’t have any domestic companies,” one economist joked cruelly.
Poor infrastructure – less than 10 per cent of roads are paved – remains a significant bottleneck. Ambitious plans are afoot, including a high-speed train link joining sober São Paulo to its historic rival, Rio de Janeiro. But this infrastructure project, at least, is unlikely to be completed in time for the World Cup as originally planned.
Brazil also remains among the world’s most unequal societies. Politicians still think little of stealing public money – fighting corruption was not one of Lula da Silva’s highest priorities. The drug trade is a growing problem not just in Brazilian cities, but also among the outer provinces that serve as transshipment points. As for violence, the death tallies notched up by Brazil’s thuggish police force can make paramilitary groups elsewhere look almost benign.
And yet the shadows are always darkest where the sun shines brightest. What lends the new Brazil its excitement and promise is that the political and economic stability the country has recently won make such problems seem manageable and solvable.
Nowhere will that be more apparent than in the upcoming presidential elections. On current form, no matter which of the two main candidates wins, it looks as though Brazil will transfer power from one democratically elected president to another for the first time without a financial or economic hiccup.
The skinny boy has come good at last, and the big boys are looking on in wonder.

Who will lead Brazil?
By Jonathan Wheatley
If any one figure personifies the new Brazil, it is surely Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president since January 1 2003.
His childhood journey from rural poverty in Brazil’s hard-scrabble north-east to the industrial rust belt around São Paulo is one that millions of his compatriots have made themselves. His ascendancy from shoeshine boy to lathe operator, from union leader to founder of one of Brazil’s biggest political parties and thence to the presidency, mirrors Brazil’s own extraordinary progress over the past decade and a half.
His charisma and popularity – his support in opinion polls has hardly dipped below 70 per cent during two four-year terms – are the perfect symbol for the exuberance and confidence of Brazil’s rising consumer classes.
But Lula da Silva’s time is almost up. Four months from now, in October, Brazilians must choose a new president.
To some, the election makes little difference.
“Sincerely, I really don’t think markets are worried,” says Rogério Schmidt of CLP, a São Paulo political think-tank. “There is a sense that whoever wins, there will be a mix of orthodox and heterodox policies.”
That view is supported by the fact Brazil has enjoyed broad continuity in macroeconomic policies for the past 16 years. The inflation-busting reforms that laid the basis of today’s prosperity were introduced in 1994 by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, then finance minister and subsequently president from 1995 to 2002.
When Lula da Silva was elected to succeed him, Brazil’s borrowing costs soared as investors worried that the former firebrand leftwinger would lose control of public finances and lead Brazil into default.
But Lula da Silva moved quickly to calm such fears, by promising no rupture with the past and by installing trusted pro-market figures at the finance ministry and central bank (the former lost to a corruption scandal in 2006; the latter still in office today). Many observers expect similar or greater continuity when the president hands over to his successor in January.
Others are less sanguine. They worry that investors take too much comfort from the ease of transition last time around and risk becoming complacent about Brazil’s future prospects.
“It worries me that people think this election doesn’t matter,” says Jim O’Neill, chief economist at Goldman Sachs and one of Brazil’s most vocal champions over the past decade. “People are getting carried away.”
He says he has no view on who would make the best presidential successor, as long as that person ensures current macro policies stay in place.
The frontrunners in opinion polls are José Serra and Dilma Rousseff. He was governor of São Paulo state (Brazil’s biggest) and she was Lula da Silva’s chief minister until both stood down in April to qualify as candidates.
It is often supposed that Serra is the more market-friendly candidate while Rousseff is more inclined to enlarge the role of the public sector in the economy to the detriment of the private sector. Serra was a highly successful health minister under Cardoso who has earned a reputation for managerial efficiency and fiscal austerity, not least as governor of São Paulo. If, as his centrist opposition party, the PSDB, has argued, what Brazil needs most is a dose of good management, he could be the man for the job.
But Rousseff is also billed as a master of management, although with the emphasis on central planning rather than a minimal state.
Lula da Silva calls her “the mother of the PAC [the government’s flagship growth acceleration programme]” and she is closely associated with what Brazilians call “developmentalism” – a drive for growth and income distribution above all else that pays less attention to the need for fiscal reform and an overhaul of Brazil’s tax system and labour laws.
This suggests a broad distinction: Serra more orthodox, Rousseff more populist. Yet this classification does not hold up to much scrutiny. The bastion of orthodoxy in the Lula government has been the central bank, led by Henrique Meirelles, a former head of Bank Boston and a former member of Serra’s PSDB.
Although the bank is not independent by law, it has been given operational independence, adjusting interest rates in pursuit of the government’s annual inflation targets, often in the face of fierce criticism from all sides, both inside and outside government.
Serra – who was moved to health from the planning ministry under Cardoso after disagreements with the finance ministry and central bank – is among the most vocal critics of Brazil’s high interest rates.
It could be argued that he would tackle the fiscal problems that have kept them high for so long. But he has a reputation as an interventionist and in recent interviews has done little to dispel a concern among many economists that he would attempt to reduce interest rates at the stroke of a pen. This, many observers fear, would not only undermine the credibility of monetary policy but also cause a mass walk-out of the central bank’s most competent directors. The impact on investor confidence could be disastrous.
Rousseff has gone out of her way to emphasise that if she wins, the three pillars of stability – inflation targeting, a floating exchange rate and gradual reductions in public debt – will be untouched. She is also close to Meirelles and to Antonio Palocci, the Lula government’s first finance minister who, in terms of economic policy, is probably to the right of Serra.
Does this mean that Rousseff is the investor’s choice after all? Perhaps, but perhaps not, for a number of reasons. One is that she is not Lula da Silva, and may lack the political clout to defend the central bank or to hold in check the statist instincts of other leaders of their leftwing party, the PT (and which some commentators say she also shares).
Another is that Serra, while erratic on monetary policy, shows every sign of being far more hawkish on fiscal issues – and a dose of fiscal hawkishness would be to Brazil’s benefit as evidence mounts that the economy is overheating, partly due to the exaggerated presence of the public sector.
Perhaps doubts such as these will be clarified as campaigning starts after the World Cup. But, again, perhaps not. Orthodox economic policies have been good for the Brazilian people but they have rarely gained much popularity, perhaps because of an enduring belief in the beneficial influence of the state.
If the opening salvos in the pre-campaign period have been any guide, the election will come down to a dispute over who is best suited to continue the work of Lula da Silva.
With the most popular president in Brazilian history making it the declared priority of his final year to get her elected as his successor, Rousseff has got to be the one to beat.

Good fortune helps strengthen Brazil’s economy
By John Paul Rathbone
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” Polonius warns his son in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “For loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.”
Towards the end of 2009, Brazil only half took Polonius’s sententious advice – even if it was the better half – when it loaned $14bn to the International Monetary Fund to boost the multilateral lender’s coffers in the midst of the global financial crisis. The loan was a potent signal of Brazil’s new-found economic confidence.
It also represented a remarkable reversal of fortunes. Eleven years earlier, facing its own financial crisis, Brazil had been forced to devalue its currency, the real, and ask the IMF for a $42bn loan, one of the Washington-based lender’s biggest-ever rescue packages.
Today, however, the boot is firmly on the other foot. While most of the developed world worries about excessive debt and stunted economic growth, Brazil has little of the former and an abundance of the latter.
“We were one of the last countries to go into the global crisis,” Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, told the Financial Times shortly after his country lent the money to the IMF. “And we have been one of the first to come out.”
After a short and relatively shallow recession, the Brazilian economy is now flying. This year it is expected to grow by as much as 8 per cent and, by some measures, is expanding at a rate of 10 per cent. Unemployment has fallen to record lows. The country’s net debt, at 42 per cent of GDP, is at a level that makes much of the developed world green with envy, while its banks are well capitalised. In April, bank credit grew at a rate of roughly 18 per cent, while retail sales rose by 30 per cent in March alone.
As a result, Brazil is awash with foreign capital. Last October, the central bank imposed a 2 per cent tax on short-term capital inflows to try to slow the boom. It made little difference, and the real continued to strengthen.
The contrast between Brazil’s current good fortune and most of the developed world is striking. Indeed, on the same day that the EU agreed a $1,000bn rescue package to try to prevent Greek rot from becoming a case of fully fledged European gangrene, Guido Mantega, Brazil’s finance minister, brushed off the eurozone’s distant problems.
“Europe was asleep,” he told a group of investors at an FT conference held at the neo-classical splendour of the Copacabana Palace Hotel in Rio de Janeiro. “But its crisis is not going to hurt Brazil’s economy. There may be some turbulence in financial markets. But it will pass.”
For the moment, Brazil is relishing its newfound dynamism. And with this confidence has come a palpable sense of optimism about its future.
Thanks to the orthodox anti-inflation policies of former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, subsequently continued by Mr Lula da Silva, the hyperinflation that blighted the country in the 1980s is a nightmare that nobody remembers. Exports have quintupled in value over the past 20 years. Foreign debt has fallen to just 4 per cent of GDP.
More importantly, between 2004 and 2008, the level of poverty fell from almost half of Brazil’s 192m population to roughly a quarter. Over the same period, and helped by an income transfer programme called “bolsa família”, roughly 10m Brazilians joined the ranks of the middle class, defined as households with a monthly income of R$1,100 ($610) or more.
All this is a source of pride for Mr Lula da Silva, 64, a former lathe operator who began his political career in São Paulo as a trade union leader. In one of the world’s most unequal societies, his rise is a potent symbol of social mobility and hope.
This growth and hope has also had profound economic consequences. Brazil’s several million new consumers have created an internal market that multinational companies are scrambling to tap. Brazil is poised to overtake Germany as the world’s fourth-biggest vehicle market. “We’ve doubled our manufacturing capability,” says Antonio Roberto Cortes, chief executive of Latin American operations at MAN, the German truck maker.
São Paulo has also become a hot spot for global investment bankers. The flotation by Santander, Spain’s biggest bank, of its Brazilian subsidiary raised $8bn in 2009’s biggest initial public offering, and valued the unit more than the entire worth of Deutsche Bank worldwide. The BM&FBovespa, the Brazilian exchange, currently trades more single equity options than any other derivatives market in the world. And then there are mergers and acquisitions.
“There is huge foreign interest,” says James Sinclair, head of CFS Partners, an investment bank boutique. Emblematic of this interest was the attempt in May by Spain’s Telefónica to buy out its partner, Portugal Telecom, from Vivo, their jointly owned operation that is Brazil’s biggest mobile phone operator. Telefónica offered a 150 per cent premium to PT for its share. But given that Vivo is one of both PT and Telefónica’s few bright spots, the offer was not enough.
Much of the country’s recent economic and financial success stems from its own policy efforts, but a large part is also due to sheer good luck. Scarred by past crises, Brazilian banks spent most of the noughties at home rather than venturing abroad. They therefore avoided loading up with the sub-prime loans that later almost sank the west’s financial system. The Asia-driven commodity boom then kept Brazil going through the worst of the global downturn, while its social policies shielded the poor. Near-zero US interest rates, meanwhile, began to deluge the country with cheap money.
These capital inflows are a mixed blessing. Brazil, with its low savings rate, will always need foreign capital to finance its growth. BNDES, the state-owned development bank, has a balance sheet bigger than the World Bank’s. Yet even that is not enough to meet Brazil’s vast investment needs, such as the $500bn of planned infrastructure investments envisaged by 2014.
But the inrush of foreign money also threatens to drive the real to levels that threaten the competitiveness of local exporters. Cheap imports could, meanwhile, undercut the viability of local manufacturers. It is probably no accident that increasing numbers of Brazilians firms are setting up operations abroad.
Indeed, the country may be enjoying too much of a good thing. Either high commodity prices or low US interest rates would be enough to sustain a boom – and often have in the past. But Brazil has them both at the same time. As the IMF warned in its latest regional outlook, it is an unprecedented bonanza. The challenge now is how best to manage the bounty without pigging out. As Nicolás Eyzaguirre, the IMF’s regional director, has put it: “Avocadoes are good; so are cream, whiskey and tomatoes. But mixing them all together makes you pretty sick.”
A sense of complacency that the good times of the past 10 years will inevitably continue for the next 10 may therefore be Brazil’s greatest threat. With the economy growing faster than the 5 per cent rate it can currently sustain safely without further structural reforms, inflation has risen above the central bank’s 4.5 per cent target. In April, that prompted the first in a series of interest rates hikes that are expected to take the benchmark Selic rate to almost 12 per cent. That would be an unthinkable level in the US or Europe.
Unfortunately, it may also serve to attract even more foreign capital, so driving the real to ever more uncompetitive levels. The effects of this can already be seen in the widening current account deficit. While exports have been growing at a 30 per cent rate, imports are rising almost twice as fast.
Cuts in government spending will be required to cool down Brazil’s red-hot economy, although applying such restraint in an election year will not be easy. But without it, the country could in time face the same financial vulnerabilities that have done for its economy so often in the past.
As Cassius told Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, men and countries can be masters of their fate. Exercising that mastery would be the truest sign of Brazil’s coming of age.

Why Brazil must try harder
By Martin Wolf
Brazil is the country of the future – and always will be. So goes an old joke. But is it a joke on the world at last? Has Brazil – anointed by Goldman Sachs as the B in Brics – at last become a country of the present?
The answer is yes, but only up to a point. Brazil is still a long way from matching the performance of India and China. It can, and should, do far better.
Brazil’s great achievements of the past decade and a half are those of stability – political and economic. Under the presidencies of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003) and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-), it has achieved stable democratic rule. The era of military rule, which ended in 1985, seems distant; so, too, do the days ofinflation, which peaked at an annual rate of 2,950 per cent in 1990.
Under the “real plan” launched by Cardoso in 1994, inflation was at last tamed. After lowering inflation via a quasi-fixed exchange rate, a currency crisis in 1999 drove Brazil to adopt a floating exchange rate. Since then, the central bank has reduced the interest rate from 45 per cent to a low of 8.75 per cent in 2009. Buttressing this stability has been the accumulation of foreign currency reserves, which reached $235bn by February 2010, up from $33bn in January 1999.
Yet stability is not dynamism. Growth averaged only 2.9 per cent a year between 1995 and 2009. While the contraction in 2009 was modest, at a mere 0.2 per cent of GDP, the International Monetary Fund forecasts growth from 2010-13 at an average of 4.5 per cent, far below rates in China and India.
At least as important a failing is Brazil’s inequality of income. According to the World Bank, its distribution of income is among the most unequal in the world. Even if growth were to accelerate, most of the benefits are likely to go to the richest part of the population.
In 1980, China’s GDP per head (at purchasing power parity) was just 7 per cent of Brazil’s, while India’s was 11 per cent. By 1995, these ratios had reached 23 per cent and 17 per cent, respectively. By 2009, they had reached 63 per cent and 28 per cent. Between 1995 and 2009, the increase in Brazilian GDP per head was only 22 per cent, against 100 per cent for India and 226 per cent for China.
As a result, Brazil’s share of world output, at purchasing power parity, declined from 3.1 per cent in 1995 to 2.9 per cent in 2009. Over the same period, China’s jumped from 5.7 per cent to 12.5 per cent and India’s from 3.2 per cent to 5.1 per cent. This, then, is the rise of the “ICs”, not the Brics.
Brazil is a paradigmatic example of countries that have fallen into what economists call the “middle-income trap”. Can it do better in future?
If the answer is to be yes, Brazil must overcome huge structural disadvantages. Most important is its extremely low level of savings. In 2008, according to the World Bank, its gross savings were a mere 17 per cent of GDP, against India’s 38 per cent and China’s incredible 54 per cent. Unless this is raised to at least 30 per cent of GDP, the chances of sustained and fast growth in living standards are low.
Moreover, only 45 per cent of Brazil’s merchandise exports were manufactured goods in 2008, against 63 per cent for India and 93 per cent for China: industrialisation through trade will be hard to achieve. Brazil has also suffered a massive appreciation of the real exchange rate, estimated by JP Morgan at 156 per cent between October 2002 and April 2010. In addition, the ratio of trade to GDP was 28 per cent in 2008, against India’s 51 per cent and China’s 65 per cent. The appreciation of the real exchange rate makes a rise in the economy’s openness to trade unlikely.
The challenge then is clear and daunting: to move from today’s stability to tomorrow’s growth. With a population of 192m in 2008, Brazil cannot become as big a player in the world as the two Asian giants, but it could still achieve something far more important than power and influence in the world – a prosperous society at home. Much still has to change if that dream is to become reality.

Brazil’s challenge: fuel for a nation
By Ed Crooks
Once seen as cursed by its lack of fossil fuels, Brazil is now commonly depicted as an energy cornucopia.
The discovery of the vast “pre-salt” oil fields in the deep waters off the country’s southern coast, along with large volumes of potentially valuable gas, has raised the prospect that Brazil could meet all of its own energy needs and become a significant exporter of oil – and perhaps even gas.
However, while the opportunities are huge, so are some of the problems. The country faces an enormous challenge to deliver the reliable energy supplies needed to fuel its development and meet aspirations for improved living standards.
Brazil’s apparently meagre endowment of coal, gas and oil was a great stimulus to innovation, and the country pioneered renewable energy long before many developed economies.
As Antonio Dias Leite, the mines and energy minister during the 1970s who is the author of a definitive study of Brazil’s energy system, puts it, the country’s development of hydro-electric power for electricity and sugar-cane ethanol for transport fuel means it “occupies an outstanding position in the world regarding the proportion of renewable energy in its energy matrix”.
Hydro-power provides roughly four-fifths of Brazil’s electricity, and renewables overall meet nearly 45 per cent of the country’s energy needs.
However, those needs are growing fast. Brazil’s energy consumption is still well below developed-country levels, at about 1.2 tonnes of oil equivalent (TOE) per capita per year: less than half the level of the poorer members of the EU such as Portugal and Poland, which use about 2.4-2.5 TOE per head, let alone the US, which uses 7.8 TOE per head.
In electricity, the disparity is similar. Brazil’s yearly power consumption is roughly 2.2 megawatt hours per capita per year, compared with 3.7MWh in Poland, 4.9MWh in Portugal, and 13.7MWh in the US.
Brazil has been a success story in terms of access to electricity: about 97 per cent of the population is now connected, but the system requires continuous investment to meet rising demand. The rule of thumb is that electricity consumption grows by roughly 1 percentage point more than the economy, so with growth estimated at approximately 7 per cent for 2010, power demand could grow by about 8 per cent.
The country’s reliance on hydro-power may be good for its carbon-dioxide emissions and dependence on imported fossil fuels, but it can cause problems of its own. In 2001, the electricity system suffered severe shortages, caused by a combination of drought and previous underinvestment. This in turn caused significant damage to the economy, cutting growth to about 1 per cent in that year.
Mauricio Bahr, the chief executive of GDF Suez Energy Latin America, the French-owned group that is Brazil’s largest private sector electricity generator, says rising power demand means the industry has enormous potential to grow.
“We are too far away from the standard of power consumption in developed countries,” he says. “If you combine that huge potential demand with our huge potential resources, there is a great opportunity there.”
He adds that the structure of the electricity industry under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was elected as president in 2002, is highly favourable to private sector investment. Government agencies co-ordinate projections of power demand from the largely privately owned electricity distributors, and generators sign long-term supply contracts that allow them to finance their investments.
“The regulatory side today is very predictable, and once you have a concession, you can show a revenue stream for 30 years,” Bahr says.
However, the development of new hydro-power projects is hampered by growing concern about the effect of dam building on local communities and the environment, as reflected in the international campaign against the Belo Monte project planned for the Amazon region.
New projects are designed very differently from the giant dams of the past, and use newer, more advanced turbines in an attempt to minimise their impact on local communities. GDF’s Jirau dam, and the Santo Antonio dam being built by Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction group, both on the Madeira river in the far west of the country, require much less flooding per megawatt of electricity generated than dams from the 1960s, but that has not been sufficient to satisfy their opponents.
While in most developed countries all the potential for hydro-power has generally been exploited, Brazil still has huge untapped resources. Even allowing for the more restricted style of development now used to try to meet environmental concerns, the country is using only about 30 per cent of its hydro-power potential.
Even so, the limitations of hydro-power mean there is still interest in developing more coal- and gas-fired plants – which now provide roughly 13 per cent of Brazil’s electricity – and more nuclear plants in addition to the two already in operation, which generate a further 2 per cent.
However, supplies of fossil fuels remain limited. For oil, Brazil is now self-sufficient, and the offshore pre-salt fields offer the prospect that the country will become a significant exporter. But the oil is hard to access, often 23,000 feet below sea level under layers of water, salt and rock. BP’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a reminder of the hazards of extracting oil in such deep waters.
For gas, the problems are even more daunting. Piping the gas to shore seems out of the question owing to the long distances involved, and the most promising route appears to be liquefying it offshore, on floating plants. That, however, is a new and untried technology, and will hold difficulties of its own. Although Brazil is also trying to develop other sources of domestic gas, and has built two terminals for importing liquefied natural gas, it looks likely to have to rely on the 2,000-mile pipeline from Bolivia as its main source of imports, even as the share of liquefied natural gas grows.
So while Brazil now has a portfolio of energy resources that any country would want, it still has a long way to go before it can really be said to have a similarly enviable level of provision.

Brazilian banks return profits with interest
By Jonathan Wheatley in São Paulo
Regina Araújo, one of Brazil's army of domestic servants, has just bought a cordless telephone and answering machine from Casas Bahia, a big high street retailer.
She takes the sales slip from her handbag to show the price: R$169.90 ($95). Or, that's what she would have paid up front. Instead, she chose to pay 10 monthly instalments of R$40.15 each.
"I know," she says, as if doing the maths for the first time. "For us [people on low incomes], it's impossible to buy anything up front. But the instalments fit our pockets."
For Brazilians, high interest rates are a fact of life. According to the central bank, the average overdraft rate charged by high street banks in May, for example, was 161 per cent a year.
The average annual interest rate paid by individuals was 41.5 per cent. For companies it was 27 per cent. Both figures are artificially low, distorted by subsidised credit in the corporate sector and by new forms of secured lending available to only some consumers.
So it is hardly surprising that Brazil's banks are among the most profitable in the world. Return on equity - a standard measure of profitability - at Unibanco, Latin America's biggest bank, will be about 25 per cent this year, according to a recent study by Roberto Attuch and colleagues at Barclays Capital. Other big banks are not far behind.
Such earnings have been a big pull for investors. Last year, Santander of Spain floated Santander Brasil, its Brazilian unit, raising $7bn in the world's biggest initial public offering of the year. Its ROE trails that of its Brazilian competitors, Mr Attuch says, simply because it has yet to put that capital intake to work.
"Margins are high in the retail sector because there is not much competition," Mr Attuch says. Account holders take little notice of what their banks charge, paying more attention to convenience and standards of service, he says, although even these factors would have to be compelling to make them change banks.
With little pressure to reduce margins, other analysts say, private-sector banks tend to use the big public-sector banks - made less efficient partly because they often lend according to government policy rather than market imperatives - as their benchmark.
Luis Catão, economist at the Inter-American Development Bank, says one reason consumers accept expensive credit is because it is so scarce. "People didn't used to be able to borrow at all," he says. "Effectively, interest rates were infinite. Anything below that induces you to borrow."
Under the high inflation that dogged Brazil until the late 1990s, banks preferred to lend to the government - a low-risk, high-return investment - rather than consumers and businesses. Credit has expanded in recent years but is still equal to only about 45 per cent of gross domestic product, much less than in other big economies.
One problem is the lack of any positive data on people's credit history. Only bad payers have a history; in the absence of data, good payers are treated as being just as risky.
This in part explains why small changes in the central bank's overnight rate - currently 10.25 per cent a year - have a big knock-on effect on market lending rates. Banks still often prefer smaller but safer returns from the government. If the overnight rate goes up a little, banks will charge a lot more to take the additional risk of consumer credit.
This is one reason why spreads - the difference between funding and lending rates - are so high. There are others: reserve requirements (the share of deposits banks must park at the central bank) are very high at almost 30 per cent, and a lot of lending is directed by law to lowreturn sectors.
But recent developments show that spreads do come down when conditions are right. Since 2004, loans have been permitted in which instalments are deducted from borrowers' pay before they receive it.
With a reduced risk of default, such loans cost an average rate of 27 per cent a year in May - compared with nearly 57 per cent for other forms of consumer credit - and accounted for 60 per cent of all personal lending, up from 53 per cent in December 2008. Yet access to such credit is still much easier for public sector workers, who take 86 per cent of loans, because they are less likely to lose their jobs than private sector workers.
Even so, Mr Attuch says this is part of a broader shift from unsecured to secured lending that will help drive down rates across the credit industry. For this and other reasons he thinks that, in spite of their attractive margins, banks face little risk of being undercut by lending from other institutions.
If anything, it is banks that are expanding into new areas. Casas Bahia - where Ms Araújo bought her telephone - used to finance its sales with its own capital. Since 2004 it has handed such operations over to Bradesco, Brazil's second-biggest private-sector bank.

Bumper harvest as professional farming takes hold
By Jonathan Wheatley
André Pessôa stands in a field of cotton that stretches across a wide plateau to the horizon and beyond.
The vast field is part of a farm near the town of Luís Eduardo Magalhães in the far west of the state of Bahia. Like many in the region, it is owned by foreign investors: in this instance, Agrifirma Brazil, a UK farm fund set up in 2008 and backed by Jacob Rothschild and Jim Slater, the former corporate raider.
“I think this region is almost a laboratory for what we will see in other parts of Brazil’s agricultural frontier,” says Pessôa, a partner at Agroconsult, a farm consultancy.
Investors have been attracted to western Bahia – and, increasingly, to parts of the neighbouring states of Piauí, Maranhão and Tocantins – by a unique combination of circumstances.
Land here is flat, on a plateau about 800m-1,000m above sea level, which means that even if the days are scorching, the evenings are cool (an important consideration not only for foreigners but also for the many farmers who have migrated here from Brazil’s south). Rainfall is adequate and, crucially, predictable. Transport logistics, it is true, remain problematic, but the distance to market is much less than in Brazil’s other big agricultural frontier in Mato Grosso state, to the west.
Above all, there is a lot of virgin land and it is still relatively cheap. This means farmers here can apply from scratch the lessons learned over the past 20 or 30 years as central Brazil, formerly regarded as useless for agriculture, has been transformed into one of the world’s most fertile regions.
Like the farmers in Mato Grosso, those in western Bahia treat the soil with nutrients and put down chalk to reduce its acidity. They rotate crops – typically soya, maize and cotton – to keep soil rich. They use the latest technology, in crop varieties developed for the tropics and in combine harvesters with satellite guidance systems accurate to within a few inches.
But unlike farmers in other parts of Brazil, they have managed to avoid some of the pitfalls encountered during the country’s rapid agricultural development. Many farmers colonised the centre-west and parts of the Amazon basin during the military dictatorship of the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, when they were helped by government incentives and little regard was paid to social or environmental issues.
Some of them simply ignored environmental regulations that were rarely enforced, tearing down the scrubby cerrado woodland and, further north, the Amazon rainforest, often for ranching. Others were placed outside the law by new legislation in the 1990s that reduced the amount of land they could clear for farming or ranching.
Labour laws were also ignored, with workers often housed in menial conditions and on minimal pay that amounted to slavery.
Better enforcement, education and pressure from environmental groups and the market have brought many improvements. And because western Bahia and the surrounding areas have been settled relatively recently, many farms have been established using modern practices and governance that those in other parts in Brazil have adopted only slowly, if at all. For investors here, being associated with the kind of practices that have often tarnished Brazilian agriculture in the past is not a risk they are prepared to take.
“You have investors who follow your day-to-day activities, and no investor wants the risk of being involved in a situation that infringes the law,” says Pessôa. “This is the big change. It’s another type of capital and another way of doing business.”
This means not only that farmers are rigorous in obeying environmental and labour laws, but that they also adopt best practice at all levels of the operation, from the correct use of fertilisers and pesticides to hiring reputable lawyers and accountants – and not relying upon friends or relatives, as is common elsewhere.
Because of their commitment to the bottom line, they pay special attention to how their crops are commercialised and to hedging against fluctuations in commodity prices and exchange rates.
Farms here also tend to be big: tens or even hundreds of thousands of hectares, rather than the 40-50 hectares many farmers of the previous generation used to work. Efficiency is gained much more quickly; workers are properly trained, clad, housed and fed, and they are also retained for longer and have a stake in the business, which offers them stable employment and the prospect of promotion.
Not all farms around Luís Eduardo Magalhães are run along these lines. Such farms may not even be in the majority yet, but will be soon. Already, they have enough weight to have created a culture of good governance that other farms will find it almost impossible to ignore. Many farms, for example, have introduced profit-sharing for their workers. Any farms unwilling to follow risk losing their best employees.
“We are very, very positive about Brazil,” says Martin Richenhagen, chief executive of AGCO, the farm machinery manufacturer. “It is one of very few countries that has not only resources but also very professional farmers.”
The expansion of farming into Mato Grosso and other parts of central Brazil has already created a global agricultural powerhouse. From a middling agricultural country just two decades ago, Brazil has become the world’s biggest exporter of beef, chicken, orange juice, green coffee, sugar, ethanol, tobacco and the “soya complex” of beans, meal and oil, as well as its fourth-biggest exporter of maize and pork.
It has achieved this by opening new land for farming and by making enormous efficiency gains. Over the past two decades, productivity – measured in tonnes of grain produced per hectare – has doubled, according to Roberto Rodrigues, a former minister of agriculture and now a consultant and professor at GV Agro, part of the FGV-EAESP business school in São Paulo.
What has often been lacking is good governance and, with it, the capital to deliver the kind of growth to take Brazilian agribusiness to the next level.
“This region will overtake other frontier regions, and other new areas will develop along the same lines,” says Pessôa. “It’s a much more sustainable model. And it’s excellent for the country.”

End of the road for Brazilian farmers’ competitiveness?
By Jonathan Wheatley
In spite of the efficiency gains Brazil’s farmers have achieved over the past two decades, they still face one significant constraint on competitiveness: transport.
According to Agroconsult, a farm consultancy, it will cost an average of $103 to transport a tonne of soya from Mato Grosso in central Brazil to ports in the country’s south-east during the current harvest. That compares with a field-to-port cost of just $22 in the US and $17 in Argentina – both important competitors of Brazil’s on world markets. Even in Paraná, southern Brazil, where the distance to port is much shorter, the average cost per tonne will be $44.
The reason is simple: the extreme paucity of rail and river transport, ideally suited to carrying relatively low-value goods over long distances when time is not of the essence. In Brazil, in spite of the country’s continental dimensions, roughly 70 per cent of cargoes are carried by road. Most highways are poorly paved, if at all, which means high maintenance costs for lorries, many of them old and long past their best. Rising fuel prices and punitive taxes add to the burden.
It would not take much to turn this situation on its head. Brazil is blessed with one of the world’s greatest river systems. Apart from a chain of mountains along the coast, much of its countryside is flat, making it easy to build railways. Yet a chronic shortage of investment has left these advantages largely untapped.
This is starting to change: a railway from Belém at the mouth of the Amazon to the interior of São Paulo state 1,700 miles to the south has been under painfully slow construction since 1987, although progress has speeded up recently. Other railways privatised in the late 1990s have taken some of the burden off highways in the south. Two more railroads that will connect central Brazil to ports in the states of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia are being readied for construction.
Some investors are already taking a punt that these will indeed be built – and quickly.
“The prices you’re seeing for land good for soya beans in the north of Brazil are taking into account the fact they expect to have infrastructure improvements that will allow these properties to be more profitable further down the road,” says James Sinclair of CFS Partners, a São Paulo boutique investment bank involved in farm deals.
“[But] if these infrastructure improvements are not put in place, some of the prices they’re talking about are too high.”

Infrastructure investment puts Brazil on road to prosperity
By Jonathan Wheatley
It is about an hour and 20 minutes by helicopter from Rio de Janeiro to Açu, a coastal village in one of the poorest areas of Rio state.
There is not much to see on the way north once you pass Búzios, the resort made famous in 1964 by Brigitte Bardot when she visited with her boyfriend, Brazilian musician Bob Zagury. The mountains soon recede behind a wide, sandy coastal plain, dotted with coconut plantations and not much else. Green coconuts sell for 50 centavos ($0.28) each near Açu; growers can get more, maybe R$2 each, if they load up a lorry and drive the five hours to Rio. But they may soon be able to earn more closer to home.
Just beyond Açu you can see why: a massive concrete finger, 2.9km long and 26.5m wide, points out into the south Atlantic. This, when it is ready for operation in 2012, will be the main pier for Açu Superport, a port and industrial complex one-and-a-half times the size of Manhattan island.
It would be hard to find a more fitting symbol for the new Brazil. At sea will be 10 deepwater berths for ships carrying oil, coal, iron ore, steel, pig-iron, granite and other goods; 9,000 hectares of land behind the beach are being prepared to receive (among other things) two steel mills, two cement factories, an iron-ore terminal, a thermoelectric power station and a car factory.
The synergies are clear. Iron ore will arrive on a conveyor belt being built by Anglo American from its inland mines in Minas Gerais state. Coal will arrive by ship. Out to sea are Brazil’s most productive oil fields, ready to pump natural gas to the power station – which, as it is on a private complex, can deliver tax-free electricity at a 30 per cent discount to the national grid.
This is more than a list of promises. Açu Superport is being built by Eike Batista, owner of EBX, a holding company that controls five publicly traded operating companies in mining (MMX), oil and gas (OGX), power generation (MPX), shipbuilding (OSX) and logistics (LLX).
LLX is building the port complex at a cost of R$4.3bn. MPX will spend US$10bn on the power plant; Batista hopes to attract another US$30bn from other investors. A dozen companies have already committed, including Wuhan Iron and Steel, China’s third-biggest steel maker, Royal Dutch Shell and White Martins, the Brazilian gas company. Altogether, LLX has signed 70 memoranda of understanding with companies preparing to invest at the complex.
“No heavy industry operating in Brazil or thinking of doing so can afford to ignore Açu,” says Batista. “It will deliver an industrial revolution.”
The contrast with the old Brazil could hardly be more striking. Down the coast at Santos, Latin America’s biggest port, 90 per cent of freight arrives by truck and just 10 per cent by rail. When the FT visited recently, the streets were strewn with soya beans that had bounced off lorries travelling on poorly paved roads from farms as far as 2,000km away.
Today, Santos handles about 90m tonnes of cargo a year – more than a quarter of all Brazil’s foreign trade. By 2014, it will handle 230m tonnes, with about 70 per cent still arriving by road. That will put enormous strain on the two coastal highways and on the town of Santos itself, already congested with queues of heavy lorries crawling through its cobbled streets.
Açu is not the only port in Brazil holding out the promise of world-class efficiency: there are plans for a steel mill and oil refinery at the port of Pecém in the north-east; an industrial complex is developing at the port of Suape, also in the north-east. At Sepetiba near Rio, the mining group Vale is building an industrial complex centred on a port and steel mill.
But if such projects throw the problems of Brazil’s older ports into relief, the outlook for the country’s infrastructure is deeply uneven. In electricity generation, for example, vast hydro stations are being built in the Amazon basin, often in the teeth of fierce environmental protests. At the same time, Brazil has diversified from heavy reliance on hydro power – which is cheap and relatively clean, but can run into trouble when rainfall is low – by building more thermal plants and investing in other renewable sources such as wind power and biofuels.
The electricity sector is widely seen as a successful example of joint public and private enterprise, based on well-designed regulation. In water and sewage, by contrast, regulatory uncertainty has stymied progress. Although 80 per cent of households have access to clean tap water, just 42 per cent are linked to a sewage system and only 32.5 per cent of sewage is treated.
In transport infrastructure – widely seen as one of the biggest obstacles to growth in Brazil – the picture is also uneven. Highways, with a few exceptions, are of dismal quality and the government has been reluctant – often for ideological reasons, say critics – to put them out to concession. Brazil’s rail network is tiny for such a large country; new railways have been promised for decades and some are being built, but progress has been painfully slow.
In spite of shortcomings, one thing can be said that is very positive for the creation of the new Brazil: investment in infrastructure is now at the centre of the political agenda. The rate of investment, while still low, has risen over the past decade and is likely to keep rising. In the past, investment has been sacrificed while the machinery of government has become ever more bloated. This, at last, is changing. For all Brazilians, and not only the coconut growers of upstate Rio de Janeiro, that is very good news.

Will Brazil be ready to play host to the world – twice?
By Harvey Morris
Brazil scored an impressive sporting double last year when it won a bid to hold the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, capping its earlier selection as nationwide World Cup football finals host in 2014.
Celebrating the choice of Rio as the first South American city to host the Olympics, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared: “Brazil is no longer a second-class country. It is a first-class country. Today we received the respect that people are already starting to show to Brazil.”
Question marks persist, however, over the readiness of the country’s infrastructure to stage the world’s two premier sporting events to the standards demanded by the organisers.
Both events will demand major investments to improve and build stadiums. But a bigger challenge will be to enhance a creaking transportation system to accommodate tens of thousands of additional visitors and – in the case of the World Cup – to transport them between 12 venues, some as much as 3,000 miles apart.
Some transport projects are already too far behind schedule to meet the 2014 World Cup deadline.
The long-mooted ambition of building a “trem bala”, or bullet train, to speed visitors between the two biggest cities of Rio and São Paulo was to have been a showcase project ready in time for 2014.
Dilma Rousseff, speaking before she stepped down as Lula’s chief of staff to run as his would-be successor in elections in October, said the plan was now to have the project up and running in time for the Olympics but that a World Cup deadline was unlikely to be met.
Air transport, the main means of long-distance transport in a vast, continent-sized country, presents even greater challenges.
The Brazilian government has shelved plans for airport privatisation until after the general election in October, delaying one proposed solution for a sector seen as woefully in need of expansion and modernisation.
Airports are already at full capacity and Embratur, the federal government tourism agency, estimates the number of foreign visitors will more than double in a decade that will see potential bottlenecks around the two big sporting events.
Jérôme Valcke, the International Football Federation secretary-general, has told Brazilian authorities that airport facilities and links between host cities is the issue most preoccupying Fifa ahead of the 2014 contest.
Infraero, the state airport authority that reports to the defence ministry, insists everything will be in place to cope with an estimated 160m passengers expected to pass through Brazil’s main airports in 2014.
When the government’s latest infrastructure investment plans were announced in March, Rousseff acknowledged, however, that the two forthcoming sporting events would test Brazil’s logistics capacity to the limit.

Auto industry speeds ahead as Brazilian demand spikes
By John Reed
At General Motors’ automotive technical centre in São Caetano do Sul, near São Paulo, a group of engineers is studying a cross-section of a car on a screen while conferring with colleagues halfway across the world.
The $100m facility, opened last September, is one of just five global product development sites the US carmaker runs; the others are in Michigan, Germany, South Korea and Australia.
GM’s Brazilian engineers regularly discuss products in development with colleagues around the world in rolling conference calls that can run from 6am to late in the evening.
Alongside GM, also investing in Brazilian engineering and design capacity are Fiat, Volkswagen, Ford and PSA Peugeot Citroën. Increasingly, this means they are developing cars not just conceived, made and sold in Brazil and Latin America, but also destined for the global market.
“We’re now developing programmes not only for our region but for the globe,” says Alberto Rejman, GM’s regional head of product engineering.
The increase in research and development and engineering capacity reflects Brazil’s growing weight in an industry whose centre of gravity is shifting from North America and Europe to faster-growing emerging markets – a long-term industry trend that accelerated during the downturn.
Last year, as the US car market shrank to a size last seen in 1982, vehicle sales in Brazil grew by 11 per cent to 3.1m, propelled by the country’s resource-led GDP growth, expanding credit and growing middle class. Industry analysts believe Brazil will overtake Germany as the world’s fourth-largest vehicle market after China, the US and Japan as early as this year.
While most European and US car plants are working below capacity as the market struggles, many factories in Brazil are operating around the clock. Fiat’s factory near Belo Horizonte in the state of Minas Gerais, produced 722,400 vehicles last year, second only to VW’s mammoth plant in Wolfsburg, Germany, which made 740,000.
As the Brazilian market sets new sales records, carmakers are reporting bumper profits. Fiat, which does not break even on its carmaking business in Europe because of intense competition, earned nearly $1bn after tax in Brazil last year, where for the first time it sold more cars than it did in Italy.
Ford, struggling to return to profitability in the US for the past decade, reported 25 consecutive quarterly profits in Latin America – making most of that money in Brazil. GM does not break out earnings for its Brazilian unit, but in the words of one official it was “printing money”. Like its competitors, GM sees tailored engineering and design as de rigueur for any global carmaker worth its name. “There are certain tastes in certain regions,” says J. Holt Ware, exterior design director.
From the late 1960s, GM began adapting its vehicles’ suspension and structural reinforcement to cope with the potholes and lombadas (speed bumps) of Brazilian roads. Later on, it tweaked cars engineered by Opel in Germany to work in Brazil: a saloon version of the Astra and a pick-up based on its European Corsa small car.
From about 2000, GM began developing vehicles in Brazil, starting with the Chevrolet Celta supermini and including the Agile small car, launched last October. Its technology centre, with more than 2,000 engineers, now designs fully formed Chevrolet cars destined not just for Brazil.
“We have now moved into global programmes and are designing pure-bred Chevrolet products from the get-go,” says Ware. “Our skill sets here are as good as, or better than, any in the world.”
Similarly, Ford employs roughly 1,000 engineers at its development centre in the northern state of Bahia. In April, Alan Mulally, chief executive of Ford, announced that it would invest $4.5bn in Brazil in 2011-15 and develop the EcoSport, a compact SUV engineered in Camaçari, Bahia, as a global vehicle, with projected worldwide sales in its different variants of 1.6m by 2014.
“For the first time, Ford is designing a global product that will be produced in Brazil,” says Rogelio Golfarb, Ford do Brasil’s institutional director. This is not just a point of pride for the local industry, but also a hard profit calculation. Carmakers, under intense competitive pressure, must pull together their global operations to remain profitable.
“No carmaker is developing cars for a single market today,” says Thomas Schmall, president of Volkswagen do Brasil. “They must be sold and produced in India, Africa and Asia.”
The industry now accounts for close to 5 per cent of Brazil’s GDP and more than a 10th of its industrial output. Carmakers are predicting continued growth, with at least 20m Brazilians having joined the ranks of the middle class in the past decade.
Brazil’s market, where high taxes make all cars expensive, was long dominated by small, no-frills “popular” cars, many with one-litre engines. While most are “flex-fuel” (equipped to run on ethanol), Brazil has not been a leader in other alternative technologies, such as hybrid or electric cars. And while the country can be proud of its home-grown cars, in other regions they would be considered very low-spec.
But Brazilian drivers are starting to demand features such as air conditioning, electric steering and automatic transmission. New regulations mean features such as air bags and anti-lock braking systems will become standard over the next 3-4 years.
“Consumer behaviour is starting to change,” says Fernando Trujillo, analyst with CSM South America. “This will be good for Brazilian production – it will make cars competitive with the world.”
The big carmakers – protected for years by Brazil’s 35 per cent import duty on cars – admit their margins are under threat from growing competition. That raises the stakes as they expand their ability to make cars in and for Brazil.
While the market’s big four – Fiat, VW, GM and Ford – control nearly 80 per cent of the market, Asian carmakers are eroding their dominance. South Korea’s Hyundai and China’s Chery Automobile both have plans for Brazilian plants.
“Brazilian consumers are becoming much better educated,” says Hau Thai-Tang, product development director for Ford do Brasil. “The days of manufacturers selling last-generation products in Brazil are numbered.”

Massive dam project comes with sizeable obstacles
By Ed Crooks
The proposed Belo Monte dam project encapsulates the problems facing large new hydro-power developments in Brazil.
Dam design has evolved since the projects of a previous generation, such as the spectacular Itaipu hydro-electric power plant in the south of the country, which began operation in 1984, and Belo Monte is intended to have a smaller impact on local communities and wildlife habitats.
But the project has nevertheless attracted a storm of protest, not only from local people, but also from environmental campaigners and celebrities in the US. James Cameron and Sigourney Weaver, the director and star of Avatar, respectively, have campaigned fiercely against the project, highlighting the similarities to their film.
Belo Monte, planned for the Xingu River in the Amazon region of northern Brazil, is a large and ambitious project. With full capacity expected to be about 11,200 megawatts, it would be the third-largest hydro-power plant in the world, after the Three Gorges dam in China, and Itaipu.
In April, the contract to build the dam was won by Norte Energia, a consortium that has Eletrobrás, Brazil’s largest power generator, as its major shareholder with just less than 50 per cent of its shares.
Eletrobrás is listed on the stock market, but the state owns more than half its shares.
The project is strongly backed by the Brazilian government, which believes the electricity generated will be essential to meet rising demand. Critics have suggested the development is unlikely to be economically viable, and that projections for the dam’s total power supply over the course of a year – generation will be lower in the dry seasons – have been overly optimistic.
The strongest objections, however, are over the impact on the area. The Belo Monte project would mean flooding 500 sq km of rainforest, far less than the 1,350 sq km that was flooded when Itaipu was built but still enough to enrage indigenous people.
One group of Kayapo people has blockaded a ferry crossing. The chief of another told TF1 of France: “I have asked my warriors to prepare for war.” Kayapo chief Megaron Txukarramae described President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as “enemy number one”.
However, with fossil fuel or nuclear plants also presenting a range of difficulties, it seems highly unlikely that the government will renege on its support for Belo Monte.

The long road to rainforest conservation
By Fiona Harvey
Flying over the Amazon rainforest, the scale of the wilderness is hard to comprehend. More than half the world’s rainforest lies in Brazil and the Amazon. So huge and so impossible to conquer that it is still home to an estimated 40-50 uncontacted tribes and contains thousands of unique species of plant and animal.
And yet, for enormous sections at its edges and radiating out from its few urbanised centres, the encroachment into the forest is obvious. Large sections have been cleared, often for ranches grazing thousands of cattle, stretching for many miles.
The rainforests of Brazil have been an icon of the environmental movement for years, as the scale of destruction has become apparent: an estimated 230,000 sq miles have been lost since 1970. Brazil points to success in slowing the rate of deforestation under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva: in 2004, a near-record of at least 4,100 sq miles (an area almost the size of Jamaica) was cut down, but in recent years that rate has more than halved.
But severe problems remain. One is governance: exerting control over such a huge area is impossible, and the government struggles to limit illegal logging and other activities. Satellite images, including Google Maps, are helping, but more resources are needed.
Another is that the Brazilian government must perform a delicate balancing act between the powerful interests of the ranchers and soy farmers, and the activities of landless peasants who venture into the forest simply to cut down a few acres where they can grow food for their families. To shift that balance in favour of conservation requires money. If forested nations – not just Brazil but also Indonesia, Malaysia and the Democratic Republic of Congo – were rewarded for keeping their forests standing, deforestation could be slowed and halted relatively quickly.
For decades, the world has failed to agree on a way of achieving this. At the Copenhagen climate summit last December, governments failed to create a mechanism that would ensure the transfer of money from developed to forested nations.
A breakthrough came at last in May, when Norway led an agreement among several countries that will result in the transfer of $4bn for forest preservation. The first beneficiary of the agreement, called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (Redd), will be Indonesia, which is to receive $1bn from Norway. However, Brazil was also represented and will be included in future talks.
“Brazil actively participated in the process of developing the initiative, and considers it essential to ensuring sustainable forest management in the coming years,” says Izabella Teixeira, Brazil’s environment minister. “Redd is important because it demonstrates that global partnership is possible.”
She says Redd can go ahead without the global treaty nations are still hoping to draw up to replace the Kyoto protocol when its main provisions expire in 2012. “Brazil firmly believes in the formal negotiation process, but in the meantime, climate change is too important to wait,” she says. “We need to show the world action. Redd will set an interim foundation for the formal strategy that is eventually negotiated.”
Recently, the Brazilian government announced an expansion of palm-oil production. Its plan is to ensure that this will be done in an environmentally responsible and sustainable manner, by only using land already degraded. Cutting down native vegetation for palm-oil plantations will be forbidden. The government argues this will provide jobs and prosperity as an alternative to destroying forest.
Green organisations are also taking steps to try to link the destruction of the Amazon rainforest with the activities of people in the developed world.
Greenpeace scored a major success last year with a campaign directed towards luxury goods companies and food producers. It managed to trace the leather in luxury goods and meat in certain food products sold in western supermarkets back to cattle that had been raised in the Amazon. Although many processing companies in Brazil are supposed to have rules in place to ensure their supply chain does not include Amazonian cattle, Greenpeace found evidence of breaches.
The campaign worked, as several luxury goods retailers and food producers said they would examine their supply chains and processors to ensure that no cattle farmed in the Amazon could find its way into their products.
Sarah Shoraka, Greenpeace forests campaigner, says: “Companies are driving the destruction of the Amazon by buying beef and leather products from unscrupulous suppliers in Brazil. The cattle industry is the single biggest cause of deforestation in the world and is a disaster for the fight against climate change. Global brands must take a stand.”
As well as taking part in the Redd initiative, Brazil has become much more engaged in ongoing international climate change talks. As the Copenhagen talks looked like breaking down in their final stages, the so-called Basic nations – Brazil, South Africa, China and India – got together with US President Barack Obama and forged a compromise. They put their names to a short-term agreement that would commit them to action on emissions. It was the basis for the Copenhagen Accord, a deal that, for the first time, involved both developed and developing countries signing up to limit their greenhouse gas emissions.
Brazil hailed the deal as a breakthrough; it had already taken a lead in the talks by announcing one of the most ambitious emissions-reduction targets for a developing country. The country aims to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by between 36 per cent and 39 per cent by 2020, relative to business as usual. That should amount to an absolute reduction of roughly 20 per cent on 2005 levels.
The government is also keen to portray Brazil as an example of a “green” economy. For years, drivers have used biofuel produced from the country’s massive sugar-cane plantations. Brazil’s ethanol plants are widely acknowledged as the most advanced and efficient in the world. For instance, they require much less energy to distil the fuel as they use plant waste, known as bagasse, for heating.
A frustration for Brazil, however, has been the tariffs imposed by other countries (chiefly the US) on imports of its biofuels. The government hopes this might eventually be resolved, perhaps as a byproduct of the climate change talks. However, the role of biofuels in the Brazilian economy may be diminishing in favour of something much less environmentally friendly.
The country is home to the second-biggest oil reserves in South America after Venezuela’s, and production of substantial reserves of natural gas is just beginning to ramp up. Fossil fuel companies are looking forward to a bonanza. For Brazil, the future may be less green than it has been painted.

The power set: five influential Brazilians
By Jonathan Wheatley and Vincent Bevins
The FT profiles five men who can each claim his part in Brazil’s rise – from running its capital markets to Rio’s Olympic selection.
Carlos Nuzman
Few men can claim to have bested Barack Obama. But despite a last-minute intervention from the US president, it was Carlos Arthur Nuzman who was victorious in the Olympic bidding sweepstakes last October. Crowds on the streets and beaches of his native Rio de Janeiro burst into celebration at the news their city would be hosting the Summer Olympics in 2016.
It was a long time coming, some said: no South American country had ever hosted the games. But as president of the Brazilian Olympic committee (COB), Nuzman made the case that Brazil could rise to the challenge. And now, as chairman of the organising committee, he must prove it.
Olympic firsts are familiar to him: in the 1964 Tokyo games he competed for Brazil in his own sport, volleyball. Later, having launched a career as a lawyer and businessman, Nuzman took over as head of the Brazilian volleyball confederation, and the international success of Brazilian volleyball teams is often attributed to his leadership between 1975 and 1996.
As COB president, Nuzman’s bid to stage the Olympics in Rio in 2004 was thwarted, but he brought the Pan American Games there in 2007, showcasing the city’s talents in preparation for the 2016 bid. He also launched a training programme for athletes and coaches, and was able to get the full backing of the government for his Olympic bid.
Nuzman will have few worries about sportsmanship or enthusiasm at the Rio Olympics. Far more challenging are the twin obstacles of inadequate infrastructure and the threat of violence. The often shocking levels of lawlessness in the favelas that surround Rio can be addressed, he said during the bid process, through a special security project for the Olympic village, relying on the armed forces if need be.
The infrastructure challenge may prove to be more difficult to overcome. Brazil has longer to prepare for the Olympics than for the World Cup in 2014, but rumours are already swirling that the Brazilian football confederation, under the leadership of the controversial Ricardo Teixeira, is behind on many of its construction timetables. The country is woefully behind in infrastructure building generally.
It will fall on Nuzman to show that Brazil can handle the responsibility that he, and many others, have long argued it deserves. – VB
Eike Batista
Eike Batista is Brazil’s richest man, with a fortune estimated at $27bn, and the eighth richest in the world, according to Forbes magazine. He has been used to media attention from an early age; his father, Eliezer, helped turn state-owned miner Companhia Vale do Rio Doce – later privatised and renamed Vale – into the world’s biggest producer of iron ore and the second-largest mining company in the world.
Raised as a polyglot in Europe, Batista sought financial independence while studying engineering at the University of Aachen by selling insurance door to door. Back in Brazil, he hit the headlines in 1991 by dropping his society bride-to-be for model and carnival queen Luma de Oliveira, with whom he went on to have two children. His enthusiasm for extreme speedboats earned him Brazilian, American and world championships.
But Batista is not the playboy his early fame suggests. He no longer races speedboats but recently secured a 10-year contract to host the sport’s world championships, held for the first time this year off Rio de Janeiro.
Brought up with mining and logistics, Batista has made these his own business since the early 1980s, first as an intermediary for diamond and gold miners in the Amazon, and later by developing his own mines in Brazil and overseas. From 2000, he concentrated his attention on Brazil and created EBX (his initials, plus X for multiplier of value) and its subsidiaries MMX (mining), MPX (energy), OGX (oil and gas), LLX (logistics) and OSX (shipbuilding and other supplies for the oil and gas industry).
He achieved something close to notoriety among Brazil’s often-sceptical media when he raised roughly $10bn from the initial public offerings of all five companies between 2004 and 2008, with little more to offer investors than ambitious plans. But his companies’ investments are on schedule and beginning to live up to their promises. MMX – which sold some of its mines to Anglo American for $5.5bn in 2008 – is already producing iron ore. MPX and OGX will be delivering energy and oil by mid-2011. LLX’s first port, Sudeste, will be operational by the end of 2011 and Açu Superport by the following year. OSX’s first shipyard is also due to commence operations by 2012.
Batista jokes that he is delivering his own private PAC to Brazil – a reference to the government’s flagship accelerated growth programme, designed to deliver the infrastructure Brazil so badly needs. It is not a bad assessment. – JW
André Esteves
The youthful face of André Esteves has been spotted at some of the main events within Brazil’s fast-growing capital markets recently.
He was there when Cosan, Brazil’s biggest sugar and alcohol group, announced its $4.9bn merger with Royal Dutch Shell – one of 13 mergers and acquisitions worth roughly $12.5bn that Esteves’ investment bank, BTG Pactual, has been involved in over the past nine months. During the same period it has also taken part in initial public offerings that raised a total of $24.5bn for 11 clients, including Spain’s Santander, whose IPO of its Brazilian subsidiary was the world’s biggest last year.
Formerly as media shy as most Brazilian investment bankers, Esteves has emerged as the public face of the country’s meritocratic investment banking culture, and he is expected by many to challenge billionaire entrepreneur Eike Batista (left) for the position of Brazil’s wealthiest individual.
But although Esteves admits to having more money than he can spend, he says getting rich was never his main motivation. “I never worked hard so that I could sell up and go to the beach,” he told the FT shortly before the Santander IPO. “I have always worked to be part of something bigger, to be a driver of change.”
His pace of activity suggests he is already there. Esteves first joined BTG Pactual as a 21-year-old systems analyst in 1989. He rose quickly and, in 1999, he and younger partners wrested control from its founders, leading Pactual through one of the fastest periods of expansion in Brazil’s capital markets.
What happened to Pactual between 2006 and 2009, when it was owned by Swiss bank UBS, is the stuff of modern legend. UBS claims it bought it for $2.6bn in 2006 and sold it back to Esteves and partners in a fire sale forced on it by the global crisis for $2.5bn. People in Brazil give different figures: they say Pactual was sold for $2.9bn with equity of $300m (after capital had been shared out to partners) and bought back for $2.2bn with equity of $2.1bn. As one person put it: “Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it.”
Either way, it left Esteves in charge of one of Brazil’s most powerful investment banks. A force for change indeed. – JW
Nizan Guanaes
Nizan Guanaes views himself as an ambassador for his country. The chairman of Grupo ABC, Brazil’s largest advertising and marketing services group, believes the expansion of ABC abroad is helping to promote Brazil and, as such, to transform the country’s economic role.
“Brazil is an emerging market,” Guanaes says. “We need to be seen as an emerging culture. We have to move from being a commodity country to building world brands from Brazil.”
Born and raised in the city of Salvador, the young Guanaes also spent some of his formative years in the UK. After returning to Brazil, he built a reputation as a skilled advertising copywriter. In one memorable television advertisement he worked on, entitled “Hitler”, for newspaper Folha de São Paulo, a camera pans out from an extreme close-up of the German dictator while a voice recounts his achievements. When the infamous face becomes clear, another voice says: “It is possible to tell a heap of lies while only speaking the truth.”
In 1989, Guanaes took over the DM9 agency with business partner João Augusto “Guga” Valente. In 2000, DM9 was acquired by DDB Worldwide for $111m, and Guanaes left advertising as part of a non-competition agreement to launch internet portal iG. Two years later, he returned to take over DM9DDB with Valente, and founded the advertising agency Africa.
These companies were the first in what later became Grupo ABC, a holding company that comprised 18 companies with operations ranging from ads and branding to promoting Brazil’s beach fashion events and putting on musicals.
Now the world’s 20th-largest communications group, with annual revenues of $277m, Grupo ABC’s international clients include Peugeot, Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble.
Dividing his time between New York and São Paulo, Guanaes remains committed to expanding operations further, particularly into businesses with a digital focus. In the past two years, Grupo ABC has acquired two Californian agencies, Dojo and Pereira & O’Dell (the latter voted California’s best digital agency), while another of his companies (he declines to say which) has signed a contract with LucasArts.
An eager participant in the Clinton Global Initiative who boosts his own image by attending events such as Davos, Guanaes argues that Brazil should seize the opportunity and do the same. “Brazil wants to know, and be known,” he says. – VB
Edemir Pinto
Edemir Pinto has seen remarkable changes since he took over as head of BM&FBovespa, Brazil’s multi-asset exchange. He became chief executive in 2008, shortly after BM&FBovespa was created by the merger of the country’s futures exchange and the São Paulo stock exchange.
In two years, Pinto has overseen rapid growth in Brazil’s exchange trading, and the emergence of the country as an increasingly sought-after investment destination – so much so that Brazil’s combined securities, futures and commodities exchange has become the world’s third-largest exchange by market value.
An economist by training, Pinto joined the BM&F futures exchange in 1986, becoming responsible for risk management and settlement the following year. By 1999, he was chief executive. When BM&F merged with Bovespa, he initially served as co-chief executive and chief financial officer of the new company.
As Brazil shrugged off the effects of the global financial crisis and interest rates plummeted in developed countries, capital poured into Brazil – to the point where the government imposed a 2 per cent tax on foreign portfolio investments to slow appreciation of the real.
Pinto worried that Brazilian equities were under “friendly fire” – that investors might simply prefer to buy shares of Brazilian companies listed abroad rather than at home. In the end, the tax proved largely symbolic and did not roll back BM&FBovespa’s growth. In spite of a drop-off at the beginning of this year, the Ibovespa, Brazil’s main equity index, has almost tripled in dollar value since March 2009.
Pinto says Brazil’s experience with crises has left the country with sound financial regulation, which provides stability for investors. “We did a review of the regulation of our exchange, and don’t think we have anything to improve,” he says. “We’ve done that.”
Under Pinto, BM&FBovespa has reached several growth milestones recently. In March, the number of options traded exceeded those traded on any US exchange. In May, the exchange received an investment-grade rating from Moody’s, the rating agency.
Pinto says capital markets in Brazil could stand to be less dependent on foreign money, and there is room for internal demand to grow. But he recently claimed: “By the end of next year we will be the second-biggest exchange group in the world.” – VB

A nation’s destiny
By Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
When I look back on my seven years as president of Brazil, I have great reason to be proud of the achievements of my government.
In that time, we have returned to growth an economy that had long been stagnant, taken tens of millions of people out of absolute poverty, created more than 14m formal jobs and increased workers’ incomes. Today, most Brazilians are members of the middle class. Our internal market has also grown exceptionally, which was crucial in protecting Brazil from the worst effects of the global financial crisis.
We did this while keeping inflation under control, reducing the ratio of debt to gross domestic product and rebuilding the regulatory functions of the Brazilian state.
We set in motion a powerful process to improve our infrastructure – in energy, housing and social assets – through the accelerated growth programme. As part of this, we are eliminating the bottlenecks that have affected our competitiveness in the past – what is often called the “Brazil cost”.
I am the first president of Brazil without a university degree, yet my government has built the most universities, and ensured they open their doors to hundreds of thousands of young poor people.
Brazil has also been able to substantially reduce its vulnerability to external shocks. We are no longer debtors, but have become international creditors. There is no little irony in the fact that the union leader who once shouted “IMF out!” in the streets has become the president who paid off Brazil’s debts to the same institution – and ended up lending it $14bn.
It is particularly satisfying to have led these changes while strengthening democracy. The tough criticism I have faced from the opposition and from sections of the media are testament to the health of Brazil’s democracy.
As I near the end of my second term as president, what makes me particularly proud is the place Brazil has come to occupy in the world over the past few years, along with other emerging nations. With them, we are creating the basis of a new international economic and political geography. With them, we have sought to build a world that is more just in social and economic terms – free of hunger and misery, respectful of human rights and able to confront the threat of global warming.
But the successes my government has achieved cannot obscure the enormous challenges that still lie ahead. Most importantly, we still have significant amounts of poverty in our country. The creation of opportunities for our young people, in particular, should remain a key objective, as it is central to the future we are building for Brazil. To do this, we must address issues such as how to improve our education system, how to find effective ways of dealing with drugs and violence, and how to offer our young people real choices in terms of work, leisure and culture.
Some of these initiatives will be decisive in the construction of an economy that is based increasingly on knowledge. The great advances we have made in the field of science – which have placed us among the best in the world in this area – must continue and be translated into technological progress.
But there are also political deficits we will have to face. The reform of the Brazilian state, which we have begun, must continue and deepen, along with tax reform. The reform of our political and electoral systems cannot wait any longer – that would compromise the continuity of the advances we have enjoyed in recent years.
For myself, after leaving the presidency I want to continue to contribute to improving people’s quality of life. At the international level, I intend to concentrate my attention on initiatives to benefit the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, and the continent of Africa. Brazil has much experience it can share. We cannot be an island of prosperity surrounded by a sea of poverty and social injustice.
I want to continue the efforts my government has made towards creating a multilateral and multipolar world that is free from hunger and poverty. A world in which peace is no longer a utopia, but a concrete possibility.