The Climate of Reform

To the gate of a Rio hospital one morning last week, a young woman brought a pain-racked old man holding a bloodstained towel to his face. "For the love of God, open up!" she cried. "My father needs a doctor!" The gate stayed shut.

The old man was one of thousands of Brazilians who found government hospitals and free-care clinics in Rio closed to them last week. Some 600 government doctors were on strike. The doctors' complaint: Brazil's President Joao Cafe Filho, determined to hold down government spending and stop runaway inflation, had vetoed a bill that would have upped minimum salaries of all government employees holding university degrees (TIME, Nov. 29).

With the outraged public on the government's side. Cafe Filho declared the doctors' strike illegal, banned picketing, sent military doctors to work in civilian hospitals, fired the 210 department heads among the strikers. Eight hospital-picketing doctors, including the president of the Brazilian Medical Association, were jailed. In a radio speech. Cafe Filho called upon the strikers to "put an end to this sad. spectacle before the world."

When the sad spectacle lasted into the fourth day, Cafe Filho tried a small-carrot-and-big-stick approach. He summoned the strike leaders to Catete Palace, told them that 1) if the doctors would do their moral duty and go back to work promptly, he would try to find a way to ease their salary pinch, and 2) if they did not go back promptly, he would begin drafting them into the army. (Most young or middle-aged Brazilian doctors are rated as military reservists.) That worked. At their strike headquarters in the dance hall of Rio's High Life carnival club, the doctors voted to end the strike. But the government stuck to its decision to fire the 210. Explained Labor Minister Alencastro Guimaraes: "Department heads with years of professional experience should have known better."

Two days after the strike's end, a special joint session of Congress met to consider Cafe Filho's veto. In wage-conscious Rio, not one Congressman was bold enough to speak in the President's defense, but when the debate ended, the vote in favor of the wage-raise bill (124-120) fell far short of the needed two-thirds majority, and the President's veto stood.

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