Cardinal error
One of the hottest topics in the national debate revolves around understanding why the country has failed and continues to fail. The worst is when someone claims that there was no failure, after all, we have one of the largest economies on the planet.
It is imperative for the jingoistic to remember that, in this regard, we are in complete downfall. Brazil's Gross Domestic Product was the sixth-largest ten years ago but now is the 12th. Furthermore, what does it mean for the tens of millions of poor and miserable people in this country to live the way they live in one of the 20 largest economies?
Former Finance Minister Pedro Malan once brilliantly said: "In Brazil, even the past is uncertain." Mr. Malan, who held the job during the two terms of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-1998 and 1999-2002), referred at the time to decisions that the courts had taken, fully reviewing laws and jurisprudence signed by the Judiciary branch itself.
Mr. Malan's axiom is also applicable to many other aspects of the national life. One example is precisely the debate, which should have been concluded for decades, as to why our recent economic failure happened. Before the reader thinks that the column refers to the disaster that we have been experiencing since 2014, when the biggest and deepest recession in our history began, this is not the case.
The reference here is to the "mother of all crises," the one that became known in 1982 as the foreign debt crisis, but which, in fact, was established among us at least two years before, when the second oil crisis was triggered.
A quick context. Because of the first oil crisis, in 1973, the government of General Ernesto Geisel (1974-1979) decided to "isolate" Brazil from the scourges caused by the rise in oil prices. The economy was in the throes of the so-called "economic miracle" (1967-1973), a period in which it grew at rates exceeding 10% per year. In view of the dizzying increase in oil prices - at the time, the country imported 85% of the oil it consumed - several nations were forced to make adjustments to adapt to that reality.
Mr. Geisel was not elected president by popular vote, but he acted exactly as if he had been. We were in a dictatorship, which, established since 1964, was going through its worst moment from the point of view of its "popularity." Children of the middle class, which gave crucial support to the military coup ten years earlier, were dying in basements, tortured by agents of the...
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