Boris casoy entrevista fernando henrique cardoso biography

He speaks better French than Portuguese. But they missed the point. Being a professor in foreign countries, as I had been, taught me a lesson: I had to speak more simply and directly than ordinary intellectuals do. I remember when, as an exile from the military dictatorship, I started giving classes in Chile. Portuguese and Spanish are very close, but they are not the same language.

Brazilians understand Spanish, but not the other way around. The Chileans protested at every word I tried to pronounce in Portuguese. So I was obliged to avoid complex words, I had to simplify. Also as a sociologist it is important to be — and you are trained to be — in contact with people. So I visited lots of slums and favelas, shantytowns in the southern part of Brazil.

Later I conducted research with workers. Then I moved to the study of entrepreneurs. But I started my career in close contact with simple people. So I never had difficulties in dealing with people. I had also followed courses in anthropology. We actually studied the three disciplines together: sociology, economy, and anthropology.

And you know how anthropologists are — my wife was an anthropologist —, they look at very specific things. And they like to talk to everyone, take notes, reflecting on small changes in behavior. It is important for a politician to have the capacity to understand others and dialog with them. FHC: Yes, indeed. I remember I was shy when I started my first political campaign running for a senatorial seat.

To run a political campaign in Brazil means to touch people. And they grab you back with great force. At the end of the day you are really very tired, exhausted by so much passion. You have to touch. You have to be close to people. This requires some training. So when I started it was not easy. You have both to simplify and be very affirmative.

It is not easy for an academic to adapt to that situation. I remember at the beginning I tried to give a different speech at each meeting I addressed. I was ashamed to repeat the same ideas. So I tried to imagine different stories for each audience. This was a disaster. In the field of infrastructure, we need to overcome, once and for all, the ideological bias against privatization, which curtails the amount of resources available for investment and downplays the management capacities of the private sector.

We have also to make a final decision regarding the role of ethanol in our energy matrix in order to define a consistent policy to promote its use. The same goes for the modalities of exploring hydroelectric energy that remains unclear to this day. In the environmental field, these clarifications will also serve the purpose of creating the conditions for a low intensity carbon economy.

What were the main issues that you wanted to highlight with your most recent book, A soma e o restowhich was published inand have you been happy with the way the book has been received? Which position will be occupied by Brazilians, inhabitants of the farthest shores of the West, in this changing world? All this and more is dealt with in a colloquial and straightforward language.

He was married to anthropologist Ruth Cardosowith whom he had three children. Fernando Henrique Cardoso served two consecutive terms as President of the Federal Republic of Brazil and, according to an opinion poll carried out by Prospect and Foreign Policy, is considered to be among the top two hundred most influential public intellectuals in the world.

C and the Thomas J. Watson Jr. He was born in in Rio de Janeiro and was married to anthropologist Ruth Cardosowith whom he had boris casoy entrevista fernando henrique cardoso biography children. I believe our greatest contribution was to bring about the conditions necessary for Brazil to advance towards the achievement of the main goals of the Constitution: the consolidation of democracy and the realization of wide-ranging social rights.

This was made possible by bringing stability and constructing a new regime. Out of control inflation and the financial weakness of the State were getting in the way of securing democratic governance and constituted a severe hindrance for the social rights laid out in the Constitution. This, however, has now changed. From a historical perspective, it would be fair to say Brazil has never before been as democratic a country as it is today, both with regard to the exercise of political rights and access to social rights.

I must however point out that this cannot be attributed to a single government. It rather reflects a change in Brazilian society. There are numerous initiatives on the agenda. The key is to identify our own idea of which reforms are necessary. New challenges lie ahead. It is estimated that by the economically active population of Brazil will be million.

Quality jobs must be created for this growing contingent of the population, which must be given the necessary tools to be able to fill these posts. There is a need for greater business initiatives and development projects on one hand, and for better education on the other. The next twenty years will be decisive since from our window of demographic opportunity will begin to close.

I was trained to speak to people, to hear people, and to be in touch with the poorest part of Brazilian society. It was the beginning. But this was important because it gave me the possibility to understand the Brazilian population from a broader point of view, not being limited to my own class.

Boris casoy entrevista fernando henrique cardoso biography

I learned how to speak with people without being pedantic, in a more simple way. How can you speak to the masses? It would be impossible to be understood by people. It also was important for me to more simple in the way I relate with people. Could you tell us a little bit about how your research might have affected your relationship with the U.

Or other developed countries? Maybe my main contribution in that area was to give some dynamics in that relation, not to understand the relation as if it was a static relation. My sense has been that always it will be possible to move from the under-development toward development. Of course, I never realized what would occur nowadays, that is to say, a complete reverse.

The old periphery became part of—almost, not yet—almost part of the center. This was not conceivable. But my approach was more dynamic than the normal ones. Normally people stress dependency as it was a kind of straightjacket to prevent development, and we stress development in spite of dependency. In that sense, it also helped me to relate to the people in Europe, or in America.

I was a professor here [in the U. So I had no difficulties in Europe or America, being President. How would you respond to such criticisms? Brazil has to be more responsible in introducing new reforms. Inflation is not the main problem, because we learned how to deal with inflation; but the rate of growth depends not just on the international situation the price of commodities but also our capacity to be more productive domestically, to increase our own domestic market, and to continue export.

Our main question now is how to increase savings, how to transform savings into investment, and how to increase productivity in a double sense: by generalizing education, and also in increasing productivity out of the factory,— roads, airports, energy, the tax burden. We have to deal with these questions. This is our agenda for the coming years.

We have to have responsibility in some areas which are global, for instance the environment. I think that it is a key area in which Brazil can play an important role, provided we will be more consistent in our own domestic policy regarding the environment; and utilizing, in a more intelligent way, our natural resources: oil, sugar cane, ethanol, hydroelectricity.