Brazil: The Early Bird

The convention hall in Sao Paulo rocked to thunderous chants of “La-cer-da! La-cer-da!” Brazil’s revolution was only six months old, and new presidential elections are not scheduled until Nov. 3, 1966. But Carlos Lacerda, 50, the mercurial Governor of Guanabara (Rio) State, is off and running full tilt for the presidency. Accepting the unanimous nomination of his National Democratic Union, Lacerda immediately boarded a campaign “Train of Hope” for a whistle-stop tour of 18 towns, standing on the back platform and fervently promising “a land of tranquillity, a government which functions without fear of demagoguery, without fear of dictators.”

Brazilians know Lacerda as a politician in perpetual motion, the man whose unceasing attacks forced Jãnio Quadros to resign and focused opposition on his successor, the Leftist João Goulart. He is a hard man to feel neutral about. In blazing headlines around the country, pro-Lacerda papers took up the cudgels for his “most noble civic and moral propositions.” Anti-Lacerda papers vilified him as a “murderer” and “torturer.” As he neared Rio last week, political enemies narrowly missed in an attempt to dynamite his train. Brazil’s three other major political parties hastily announced plans to nominate their own candidates for 1966 to combat Lacerda.

Even while they were scrambling to catch up, Lacerda went spiraling on, flew to Manhattan for a Reader’s Digest luncheon in his honor. “We shall never present a bill for the services Brazil rendered to all peoples in destroying a Communist occupation,” he said of the revolution. However, it would be helpful if the U.S. would underwrite Brazil’s currency by “the immediate creation of a fund to aid our effort against inflation,” and also “would accept paying a better price for coffee.” Suggestions like that store up political treasure back home for campaigning Carlos Lacerda.