The Builder

After President Juscelino Kubitschek made Jose Maria Alkmim his Finance Minister 28 months ago, Brazil's economic position steadily slipped. The cruzeiro free rate dropped from 70 to 147 to the dollar. A 14 million-bag mountain of surplus coffee piled up, and so did the balance of payments deficit. The U.S. promised help --provided something was done about the fiscal chaos. Last week Kubitschek replaced Alkmim with Lucas Lopes, a brilliant engineer who masterminded Kubitschek's ambitious development plan.

It took political courage for Kubitschek to make the switch. Alkmim's policy of holding coffee off the market to exact higher prices succeeded mostly in giving the market to other coffee-producing countries, but it had great chauvinistic appeal to the powerful leftist nationalists. Lopes, 47, believes that heavy investment of foreign private capital is needed to boost per capita income. At the present rate of production growth, he says, "it would take slightly more than 20 years to reach the $400 per capita income level.

Our great problem is to create enough investments to speed up our development." Lopes began his job by tactfully lunching with a group of nationalist Deputies. Before the lunch, Lopes was being called a "hired lackey of the trusts." After the lunch, where Lopes winningly upheld the need for foreign capital, the attack faded in all but the Reddest of newspapers. Then he got down to top priority work--negotiating a $150 million emergency loan with the U.S. Export-Import Bank.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.