Where is Brazil going?
Brazil faces an historic election in October, just as the country faces a severe economic crisis. ANDR FERRARI of Socialismo Revolucionrio, the Brazilian section of the CWI, looks at the prospects ahead. ONCE AGAIN, BRAZIL has mixed an explosive cocktail of general elections with a sharpening economic crisis. The last time this happened was in 1998, in the wake of the Asian and Russian crises, when the Brazilian economy came close to crashing too. The US administration under Bill Clinton supported a $41bn International Monetary Fund (IMF) aid package to avoid an economic collapse in the middle of the election campaign, and enable Fernando Henrique Cardoso of the Partido do Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB) to be re-elected against Luis Incio Lula da Silva of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). Only days after his re-election, Cardoso devalued the Brazilian currency, the real, and floated the exchange rate. That did not succeed in avoiding a deep recession in 1999 although the devalue
