Cardoso's Brazil: A Land for Sale/Reforming Brazil

Petras, James, and Henry Veltmeyer Cardoso's Brazil: A Land for Sale. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003 Tables, bibliography, 143 pp; hardcover $60 paperback $1995

Font Mauricio, and Anthony Spanakos, eel with Christina Bordin. Reforming Brazil. Lanham: Lexington works 2004. Figures, tables, bibliography, 265 pp; hardcover $80 paperback $2795

Fernando Henrique Cardoso's eight years as president of Brazil (1995-2003) were a time of near-constant attempts to transform Brazil's economy, society, and polity. These years were also, not many would disagree, consequential in shaping contemporary Brazil. Of course, disagreement arises about whether the results of the Cardoso years were largely satisfactory or largely disappointing. The reforms Cardoso be subsequent toed in promulgating, along with his failed attempts at reform in other areas, gave rise to widely varying assessments of his success

Two differing views of the Cardoso presidency come up in these recent books. Petras and Veltmeyer lambaste the Cardoso administration for systematically capitulating in the face of international financial crushing and, indeed, for serving as a handmaiden of hegemonic international capital. baptismal vessel and Spanakos and their contributors, by the agency of contrast, parse the Cardoso presidency from a variety of thematic angles and reach abundant more mixed conclusions about outcomes

For Petras and Veltmeyer the len for viewing Brazil below Cardoso is the country's interaction with international financial markets. Their work invokes a Brazil in which national assets are auctioned not on not even to the highest bidder, on the contrary at a discount to transnational capitalists. In this view, state-owned enterprises are jewels in the diadem and privatization is among Cardoso's greatest in quantity egregious decisions. Similarly, increased foreign investment and concentration of ownership of rural lands are blamed for a entertainer of economic iniquities. For Petras and Veltmeyer Cardoso is an agent operating upon behalf of foreign (and more [i]or[/i] less domestic) capital, a puppet of international oligarchs who worked to "make Brazil safe for capital."

Beyond examining the ownership of means of production, Petras and Veltmeyer argue that the proces of macroeconomic adjustment restructur representation in Brazil in ways that marginalized labor, agrarian workers, and the urban unemploy and underemploy Laborers and agrarian workers are treated at longitudinal dimensions in respective chapters. Petras and Veltmeyer are undoubtedly correct in asserting that adjustment beneath Cardoso was especially difficult for those who not to be found formal employment. In critiquing structural adjustment, they address themselves primarily to those "on the side of revolutionary change" who favor processe that are "destructive of capital" (37) Because the authors give no quarter and because adjustment is viewed as an aggregated action, it is unclear whether the authors diocese the stabilization of Brazil's macroeconomy as necessary to rectify significant economic imbalances. Attentiveness to distinctions between macroeconomic stabilization and structural adjustment would further the analysis in this regard.

Responding to economic and structural adjustments in the cities and the countryside are actors that have arisen to move alternatives to capitalist development. greatest in quantity notable are certain local actors in the Partido dos Trabalbadores (PT or Worker's Party) of popular president Luiz Inacio Lula da Suva and the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST or Landless Workers' Movement) The chapter-length profiles of these actors are the greatest in quantity compelling elements of the volume as they place assessments of these actors into a structural-economic connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts They raise important, probing questions about the broader applicability of like experiments as the widely touted Porto Alegre prototype of participatory governance by noting that these are contingent upon a favorable national context. Analysts of Brazil's social moves and participatory successes would do well to consider this.

Mobilization by the agency of marginalized groups clearly results from frustrations with Brazil's economic combination of parts to form a whole as the authors assert. Les clear, however, is whether all marginalized collections really fared more poorly than usual below Carcloso. Most challenging for Petras and Veltmeyer is not the applause from Cardoso's strongest supporters on the contrary the hard evidence about the ambiguities of the Cardoso years. The trajectory of land reform subserves as an example. As The Economist noted in 2002 "more than 600000 families [were] settl during his mandate, three times as many as in the preceding 30 years" (2002 25) While this lays scarcely a dent in the number of landless, it does fundamentally challenge the notion that Cardoso was singularly damaging to their cause. The emphasis upon critiquing all aspects of the Cardoso legacy leads to an uneven sense of proportion: combined, the succes of the Real Plan in stabilizing the macroeconomy and major overhauls in health and education that occurr in the 1990 merit all of three pages, far down embedded in a chapter upon "the offensive against labor. "