The Campos Plan

Over the past ten years, half a dozen ambitious plans for Brazil's stabilization and development have been launched, only to dissolve in graft, petty politics and shoulder-shrugging bureaucracy. Last week Roberto de Oliveira Campos, 47, Brazil's onetime Ambassador to the U.S. and now its able Minister of Economic Planning, presented Congress with yet another plan, supposedly carrying Brazil forward through 1966.

Broadly, the Campos Plan aims to: 1) expand Brazil's gross national product from last year's all-but-invisible 2% rise to 6% annually; 2) slow inflation from the current rate of 50% for the first seven months of this year to a more "reasonable equilibrium" of 10% to 20% annually by 1966; 3) draw new investment and cut unemployment; and 4) whittle the towering balance-of-payments deficit, which ran some $220 million last year. By 1970, Brazil's power-generating capacity is to be doubled to 12.7 million kilowatts, its steel output doubled to 1,600,000 tons.

To achieve all this would mean sacrifices. Among other things, many Brazilians would have to pay their taxes for the first time in history. Labor would have to forgo those 75% and 100% wage boosts of the Goulart days, businessmen would have to hold the line on prices, and overblown government payrolls would have to be trimmed.

But Brazilians have never been much for sacrifice; they would rather criticize. For weeks the government has been under attack from many sides. Small businessmen wail about rising costs, consumers grumble that food prices are still rising, and unions clamor for pay boosts. Even those politicians who were once in the vanguard of the revolution are sniping at the government, complaining that it is doing too little. Sao Paulo Governor Adhemar de Barros claims that 300,000 are unemployed in his state. In Minas Gerais, says Governor Jose Magalhaes Pinto, some 50,000 are out of work. The harshest words, as usual, came from Carlos Lacerda, quixotic governor of Guanabara (Rio) state. The nation, he insists, is "submerging into fraud."

Campos lets the criticism wash off his back. "Four months ago," he said, "I could have predicted exactly when the criticism would come and who would be doing it. This is the time when the pain becomes most acute. It's the darkest section of the tunnel." Not only does President Humberto Castello Branco support him, but also the larger businessmen who are able to see beyond the next bend.

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