Sharpening Definitions

The confusing, sometimes contradictory personality of Brazil's Janio Quadros becomes more sharply defined with each new series of explosions echoing from Planalto Palace. In a burst of executive action last week, Quadros showed himself to be a determined, conservative-minded economic reformer. He also proved himself impulsive, thin-skinned, autocratic.

P: To hasten the end of the old coffee system that piled up surpluses and lowered quality by guaranteeing government purchase of every bean grown in Brazil, Quadros promised coffeemen more exchange dollars for higher quality coffee, less for poorer grades. He also ended government purchase and storage of the bottom 10% of the crop (classified "refuse"), began burning the 7,000,000 bags of refuse currently on hand.

P: To restore reality to the meaningless fiction of overstated income and understated outgo that passed for a national budget under ex-President Juscelino Ku-bitschek, Quadros issued his own flinty figures for next year. Adding up the funds needed to support the immense bureaucracy and public works program inherited from Kubitschek, Quadros predicted a deficit of $513 million--so great, said Quadros, that "a potential deficit of this size has never before been confessed by a chief of state."

P:To separate himself from his own Vice President, Joao ("Jango") Goulart, a political opponent elected by means of an electoral quirk that permits ballot splitting, Quadros refused to call off corruption investigators, who have implicated Goulart in several scandals, or to blunt their reports. On a protesting letter from the Veep, Quadros scribbled: "Return, for not being written in adequate terms and not representing the truth."

Yet, with such reforms, many of them long overdue, came a much less defensible Quadros order to the Justice Minister calling for "investigation of the conduct of foreign news agencies functioning in our country, in view of the dissemination by these agencies of baseless stories of sensationalist or alarming character." The order called for "energetic steps for definitive repression" if the charges were true. Fidel Castro's news agency, Prensa Latina, cheered the order. But the independent Jornal do Brasil saw it as a clear threat to a free press: "If the President thinks he is going to take the press by the throat, order investigations right and left, silence newspapers without resistance, he is very much mistaken."

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