The Candidates

Brazil's Oct. 3 presidential election, the most important political event of the year in Latin America, will pit a stone-spined old soldier with a leftwing, nationalist program against a fiery-eyed spellbinder whose platform is austere conservatism. One afternoon last week the old soldier, Field Marshal Henrique Baptista Duffles Teixeira Lott, 65, resigned as War Minister in order "to go into the arena with no privileges or priorities." Then the red-cheeked descendant of Dutch-English immigrants slipped into mufti in an adjoining room, walked out to a waiting Jeep, and drove off through popping firecrackers and a cheering crowd to his first political rally. The presidential race was on.

Workers' Sweat. From the balcony of a building housing a Nationalist Committee for Lott, he promptly made foreign capital his prime target. Said he in a small, high-pitched voice: "We no longer desire that the sweat of Brazilian workers serve to build riches for those abroad." At his second rally of the day, he called for improvement of the government steel mill, Volta Redonda, and "more guarantees for untouchable Petrobras," the state oil monopoly.

The mantle that Marshal Lott aspires to is that of Getulio Vargas, the demagogic dictator-President who shot himself in 1954, leaving a note blaming his suicide on the pressure of "international financial groups." Last week, three days after leaving the War Ministry, Lott greeted a noisy convention to accept the nomination of Vargas' old Brazilian Labor Party (P.T.B.). "I am a nationalist," he said. "Nationalism is related to patriotism the way charity is to faith."

To get the nomination, Lott accepted as his running mate Brazil's current Vice President, rabble-rousing P.T.B. Boss Joao ("Jango") Goulart. With Goulart came a platform that includes a broad right-to-strike law for Brazilian workers, strict curbs on the remittance of profits abroad, land reform, profit sharing for industrial employees. This platform brought automatic Communist backing, an estimated 200,000 votes.

Inflation Program. Lott is also the candidate of President Juscelino Kubi-tschek's Social Democrats, a party of bureaucrats and big landholders, and he thereby inherits Kubitschek's policy of forced-draft development through inflation. Lott thus has all the massive backing that elected Kubitschek.

But Kubitschek ran in a three-way race against weak candidates; Lott is up against ex-Schoolteacher Janio Quadros, who in a few years rose from obscurity to become the new-broom governor of Sao Paulo, spark of Brazil's industrial boom. Quadros kicks off his shoes on the stump, spills ashes on his shirt and works the crowd to frenzy. His program is honest government, slashing bureaucracy, building roads and power plants, and turning private enterprise loose for progress. He describes his own nationalism as "grownup, vaccinated and old enough to vote." Quadros' main handicap: the streak of eccentricity that led him to pull out of the race one week and jump back in almost immediately (TIME, Dec. 7 et seq.). Betting odds last week: about even.

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