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Back home, Quadros applied his fire-and-cut formula for reform with such vigor that by 1958, São Paulo state was clean, or nearly so. "Some rats might still be nibbling around, but I've set out traps for them," he said. Then began the soundest development program in Brazil's history. Quadros nearly tripled São Paulo's paved highway network. He put up 1,710 miles of high-tension transmission lines, launched a power program that includes a hydroelectric project bigger than Egypt's Aswan Dam—4,900,000 kw. initially, equal to Brazil's entire capacity last year. The growth—plus Quadros' personal salesmanship—proved so attractive to foreign capital that the state drew 75% of all the new investment coming into Brazil. Just before his term ended in 1959, he almost offhandedly won a federal Deputy's seat and got ready to run for the presidency.
Slow Boat to Brasília. Quadros' campaign was a masterpiece of unorthodox politics. Traveling to Rio, he first handed Kubitschek a face-to-face warning not to pull any tricks to perpetuate himself in office.* "Do not change the rules of the game," said Quadros. "Listen to the people's cry for clean, just and honest elections." Then he vanished on a slow boat to Japan, plus points east and west, to transform Jânio the domestic reformer into Jânio the world figure.
Before long, the photographs dear to every politician's scrapbook flooded the papers. While Kubitschek struggled with zooming inflation and dunning foreign creditors, there was Quadros posing head to head with Hirohito, with Nehru, with Ben-Gurion, with Pope John XXIII, with Tito, with Khrushchev, with just about everyone, in fact, but President Eisenhower. Said Jânio sagely on his return: "From a distance I became more convinced than ever that Almighty God destined us to become a great people."
Quadros' political technique was masterful. Behind the slogan "Here Comes Jânio" he ran against Kubitschek's hand-picked candidate, piping-voiced Field Marshal Henrique Teixeira Lott. To prove to Brazilians that he was no Yankee stooge, he made a mid-campaign trip to Cuba; from there he returned with the bald-faced statement that "to accuse Castro's government, which displays absolute respect for law and propriety, of Communism is to reveal ignorance and bad faith.'' He already had proof that he was no Communist puppet: the Brazilian Reds spewed out their hatred of him and openly supported Lott. Everyone remembered Quadros' oldtime flamboyance, but he understood that Brazilians demand a dignity in their President that mayors and governors need not have—and he established that by keeping his hair combed, his suits pressed, his speeches free of personal attacks on Lott.