Partnership

The trip had gone over big; U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snyder liked Brazil and Brazil liked him. He had come to talk business in a country where U.S. investments of $611,000,000 are second only to Britain's. He had a chance to see, in a plant such as Volta Redonda (steel), the sort of thing for which the U.S. had put up Export-Import cash. When he talked, he talked straight. Brazilians ate it up.

"I never think of the U.S. as the richest country in the world," said Snyder, "but as the country that has the greatest internal debt." Brazilians had never thought of that. "The U.S.," he continued, "did not grow solely from within--but . . . through the introduction of additional manpower, of additional technical knowledge, and by the addition of foreign capital. . . . Brazil has a great opportunity for future development . . . if it can learn to accept foreign capital as a partner."

Snyder had come down hard on some Brazilian failings--the country's hesitancy about immigration, its inordinate fear of burdening itself with taxation, failure to assume responsibility in the hope that some neighbor would do all the work and take all the risks. But only the Communists screamed. "Yankee imperialism," they cried. Snyder had come "to make an inventory of our riches," to "subject our country to Wall Street." Nobody paid much attention. So far as most Brazilians could see, U.S. capital was no longer a one-way gouge; it worked for Brazil as well as the investors in the U.S. Economic partnership might come next.

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