Narrow Mandate for the 'Miracle'

"As Brazil goes," said an animated Richard Nixon in 1971, "so will the rest of the Latin American continent." Indeed, since its 1964 coup set the stage for a wave of military takeovers on the continent, Brazil has been regarded as the center of gravity of South American politics.

If only for that reason, the elections last week of aldermen and mayors in 3,968 municipalities had more than local import. Their significance was further heightened by the intense nationwide campaign waged by President Ernesto Geisel, 68, the Brazilian military's hand-picked chief of state. Though securely ensconced in his own job as President until 1979, Geisel jetted through 16 of Brazil's 21 states, kissing babies, cutting ribbons and shaking every hand in sight like any vote-hungry candidate. Along the way, he invested much of his personal prestige on behalf of local candidates of the government's National Renewal Alliance (ARENA). By allowing them to bask in the presidential aura, Geisel transformed the municipal elections into a plebiscite on the Brazilian military's twelve-year-old "revolution" and its faltering economic "miracle." As the votes of 40 million citizens were tabulated last week, both ARENA and its opposition, the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), had cause for celebration.

Geisel had apparently won his gamble for a mandate--namely, a majority vote for ARENA candidates--but not by the margin he sought. As Columnist Carlos Castello Branco wrote in Jornal do Brasil, "This is a victory with the flavor of defeat." As expected, ARENA candidates won in Brazil's rural backlands, but MDB swept five of Brazil's largest cities by substantial margins.

Black Beans. The opposition's showing was doubly impressive in view of the odds stacked against it. Unable to field candidates in a quarter of Brazil's municipalities, MDB was also stripped of a politically potent weapon--television. Under a strict electoral code drawn up by Geisel's Minister of Justice, Armando Falc`ao, candidates of both parties were forbidden to use TV or radio to speak to the voters. Meanwhile, "public service" broadcasts extolling the achievements of the revolution flooded the air waves. Weighing the opposition's impressive vote against these obstacles, political observers in Brazil now believe the MDB could dominate the 1978 races for Congress and governorships--unless the government cracks down.

For now, though, those elections are expected to proceed on schedule--a testimony to the skill and nerve that Geisel has shown in slowly moving Brazil toward democracy. By comparison with the uniformed bosses of Brazil's shadowy military "system," Geisel is something of a reformer. Since taking over as President from Emilio Medici in 1974, he has loosened Brazil's draconian discipline by opening a dialogue with some of the regime's moderate critics and curbing security forces' grossest excesses. Press censorship has been lifted from all but a few weekly magazines. He has also sacked military commanders accused of torturing political prisoners--although the practice continues. Indeed, in a blistering statement released after the election, Brazil's Catholic bishops, citing recent assaults and killing of clerics, castigated the "climate of fear" (TIME, Nov. 15).

Geisel's modest reforms have also been attacked from the right by hard-liners in his own party and the military. His liberalization program has also been made vulnerable by the collapse of Brazil's expansionist economic miracle. While both G.N.P. and exports doubled from 1968 to 1975, Brazil's economy is now pincered by rising import costs--notably oil prices, which have quadrupled to $4 billion--and foreign markets shriveled by recession. Last year's trade deficit topped $3.5 billion; foreign debt has reached $27 billion, the largest in any developing nation. Worst of all, the annual rate of inflation, under control in 1974, went over 30% last year, and is running at 50% today.

Because Brazilian expectations rose so sharply in the boom years of the miracle, Geisel and his economic ministers have been reluctant to impose fiscal restraints. Even after the first hike in oil prices three years ago, the government made no move to limit consumption. "If something is not done soon [about oil]," says one Rio banker, "it will be a disaster." Disaster, meanwhile, is an everyday threat to Brazil's working poor, whose real wages have suffered most from the renewed surge of inflation. A recent shortage of feijao--Brazil's staple, black beans--forced thousands to join snaking queues to buy what supplies the government could import from Mexico and Chile. In protest, many voters in Brazil's cities mutilated their ballots by writing in "Feijao" for alderman.

Economic woes have begun to erode the system's firmest base, the business and professional elite, who were the chief beneficiaries of the miracle. Carping against the government can now be heard in posh high-rise apartments by Rio's Ipanema Beach, where owners have grown accustomed to affluence now and more tomorrow. Some technocrats and junior officers deserted ARENA in last week's election, contributing to MDB's urban landslide.

More serious is the forced shelving of much of Brazil's development plans, estimated at $50 billion, for the next decade. Along with them could go the slogan that Geisel and ARENA candidates have trumpeted throughout the campaign: "Este e um pais que vai pra frente [This is a country that is moving ahead]."

Geisel's tentative liberalization policies may have been partly responsible for a decision last week of General Augusto Pinochet's Chilean junta to release 304 political prisoners held without charge since the 1973 coup.

Stung by a threat from Jimmy Carter that his Administration might cut off U.S. aid to Chile unless civil liberties were restored, the Pinochet government sought to rally Brazil and Argentina into a hard-line entente in Latin America's southern cone. Both countries spurned Pinochet's overtures. At a meeting in Chile two weeks ago, General Jorge Rafael Videla, Argentina's tough military ruler, told Pinochet that police-state terror had tarnished Chile's image abroad. After that rebuff, Pinochet's government reluctantly granted the amnesty as a first limited step toward regaining international respectability. Nonetheless, Amnesty International estimates there are still more than 1,000 political suspects in prison. Of the thousands of people who have been in Chile's jails since the junta took over, hundreds have simply "disappeared"; most are presumed to have been tortured and killed by DINA, Chile's secret police.

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