Brazil President Quotes

No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here’s a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages 1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn’t stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. 2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5. 3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on “Bright Eyes.” 4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank. 5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13. 6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14. 7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15. 8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil. 9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19. 10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961. 11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936. 12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 23 13) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 24 14) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record 15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity 16) Lance E. Armstrong was 27 when he won the tour de France 17) Michelangelo created two of the greatest sculptures “David” and “Pieta” by age 28 18) Alexander the Great, by age 29, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world 19) J.K. Rowling was 30 years old when she finished the first manuscript of Harry Potter 20) Amelia Earhart was 31 years old when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean 21) Oprah was 32 when she started her talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind 22) Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to reach Mount Everest 23) Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he wrote the speech “I Have a Dream." 24) Marie Curie was 35 years old when she got nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics 25) The Wright brothers, Orville (32) and Wilbur (36) invented and built the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight 26) Vincent Van Gogh was 37 when he died virtually unknown, yet his paintings today are worth millions. 27) Neil Armstrong was 38 when he became the first man to set foot on the moon. 28) Mark Twain was 40 when he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and 49 years old when he wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" 29) Christopher Columbus was 41 when he discovered the Americas 30) Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger 31) John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he became President of the United States 32) Henry Ford Was 45 when the Ford T came out. 33) Suzanne Collins was 46 when she wrote "The Hunger Games" 34) Charles Darwin was 50 years old when his book On the Origin of Species came out. 35) Leonardo Da Vinci was 51 years old when he painted the Mona Lisa. 36) Abraham Lincoln was 52 when he became president. 37) Ray Kroc Was 53 when he bought the McDonalds Franchise and took it to unprecedented levels. 38) Dr. Seuss was 54 when he wrote "The Cat in the Hat". 40) Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III was 57 years old when he successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. All of the 155 passengers aboard the aircraft survived 41) Colonel Harland Sanders was 61 when he started the KFC Franchise 42) J.R.R Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out 43) Ronald Reagan was 69 when he became President of the US 44) Jack Lalane at age 70 handcuffed, shackled, towed 70 rowboats 45) Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President

Between 1964 and 1985, the military killed about 325 suspected leftists, while more than 1,500 were tortured, according to later estimates by Amnesty International.

The United States had the Homestead Act of 1862, which enshrined small landholdings and laid the foundation for the world’s most prosperous middle class.

Land distribution in Brazil is one of the most unfair in the world. One frequently cited statistic from the beginning of my presidency showed that 1 percent of the population controlled 45 percent of Brazil’s arable land.

Depression ended, and factory output more than doubled during the 1930s. Getúlio realized that, by co-opting the new urban working classes, he could gain a powerful, up-and-coming ally and stoke the engine of economic growth.

Bush nodded. “It sounds like you’ve got a real diverse country down there.” “Oh, yes,” I said. “We are truly a melting pot.” I told him about all the immigration Brazil had from Italy, Germany, Ukraine, Japan, and so on. “We also have one of the world’s largest populations of blacks, you know.” “Do you have blacks in Brazil?” Bush asked.

In any case, could it be worse than human? I read today that humans have wiped out sixty per cent of animal wildlife since 1970. In Brazil we have a dictator posting as a democratically elected president who is opening up the Amazon to commercial interests. Human beings really don't have a better chance than AI. We are too late for anything else.

As Bell stood in silence, watching the judges turn their backs to him and begin to walk away, he suddenly heard a familiar voice. “How do you do, Mr. Bell?” Surprised, he turned to find Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil, his full, white beard neatly trimmed, his deep-set eyes bright with curiosity, looking directly at him. A passionate promoter of the sciences, Dom Pedro had asked to accompany the judges on their rounds that morning, perfectly happy to be in the tropical-like heat that reminded him of home. When he saw Bell standing in the crowd of some fifty judges and a handful of hovering inventors, he immediately recognized him as the talented teacher of the deaf whom he had met in Boston.

There were many people, Brazilians included, who believed such a change was impossible. They saw Brazil as the incorrigible land of the jeitinho, the artful little trick for getting around the system. This word, and the concept behind it, were supposedly intractable parts of our national identity, the products of a society that took deep pride in flaunting the law.

We also saw that some countries, particularly Argentina and Brazil, had been able to accommodate foreign companies without ceding control over their national interests. We postulated, then, that poor countries in a position of “dependency” on the rich ones could take certain steps toward progress in spite of the existing system. All of this sounds quite elementary and obvious now, but in Latin America in 1968, these thoughts were borderline heresy.

Supporters of Bolsonaro had created a video warning that his main rival, Fernando Haddad, wanted to turn all the children of Brazil into homosexuals, and that he had developed a cunning technique to do it. The video showed a baby sucking a bottle, only there was something peculiar about it—the teat of the bottle had been painted to look like a penis. This, the story that circulated said, is what Haddad will distribute to every kindergarten in Brazil. This became one of the most-shared news stories in the entire election. People in the favelas explained indignantly that they couldn’t possibly vote for somebody who wanted to get babies to suck these penis-teats, and so they would have to vote for Bolsonaro instead. On these algorithm-pumped absurdities, the fate of the whole country turned. When Bolsonaro unexpectedly won the presidency, his supporters chanted “Facebook! Facebook! Facebook!” They knew what the algorithms had done for them.

was not an economist. So, in thinking about how to solve the problem, I decided to start with the big picture. The root cause of inflation in Brazil was really very simple: The government spent more than it earned. When the budget turned up a big deficit every year, as it inevitably did, the government printed more money to cover the difference. Any grade-school student knows, however, that you can’t just print endless amounts of cash without having something tangible to back it up.

For generations the official U.S. policy had been to support these regimes against any threat from their own citizens, who were branded automatically as Communists. When necessary, U.S. troops had been deployed in Latin America for decades to defend our military allies, many of whom were graduates of the U.S. Military Academy, spoke English, and sent their children to be educated in our country. They were often involved in lucrative trade agreements involving pineapples, bananas, bauxite, copper and iron ore, and other valuable commodities. When I became president, military juntas ruled in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. I decided to support peaceful moves toward freedom and democracy throughout the hemisphere. In addition, our government used its influence through public statements and our votes in financial institutions to put special pressure on the regimes that were most abusive to their own people, including Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. On visits to the region Rosalynn and I met with religious and other leaders who were seeking political change through peaceful means, and we refused requests from dictators to defend their regimes from armed revolutionaries, most of whom were poor, indigenous Indians or descendants of former African slaves. Within ten years all the Latin American countries I named here had become democracies, and The Carter Center had observed early elections in Panama, Nicaragua, Peru, Haiti, and Paraguay.

Donald Trump is an extraordinary salesman. He knew how to exploit those grievances by deepening them instead of finding a way to address them. He put his supporters in this huge box, cut them off from the rest of the country, and said, “We are going to make America great again because everyone else but you has abandoned those American values. They have put other people’s interests before your interest, and I’m going to take care of you. I alone can fix it.” As I write this, we’re well into President Trump’s first year in office, and he has not been able to fix anything.

Rosalynn toured seven nations for meetings with presidents and other top officials. After careful briefings from the State Department and the CIA, she carried personal messages from me urging President Ernesto Geisel of Brazil to abandon his plans to reprocess nuclear fuel for weapons and the leaders of Peru and Chile to reduce their purchases of armaments, and to inform the president of Colombia that one of his cabinet officers was accepting bribes from drug cartels. Rosalynn was, if anything, more frank and forceful in her presentations than Secretary of State Cyrus Vance or I would have been.

Before he left, Sartre took a small side trip to Araraquara, in the interior of São Paulo state, where he had an unlikely encounter with a Brazilian of truly global stature. The episode is retold in Joseph A. Page’s fine book The Brazilians: As Sartre stood outside a building conversing with a cadre of intellectuals, down the street came Pelé, the world’s greatest soccer star, accompanied by several fans. The two groups converged on a street corner. When they separated, the intellectuals realized they were now following Pelé, and Sartre was walking alone. The intellectuals ran back down the street, a bit embarrassed, and rejoined their French hero. According to Page, many residents still refer to the spot as “Pelé-Sartre Corner.

Professor Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, and former Chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, goes public over the World Bank’s, “Four Step Strategy,” which is designed to enslave nations to the bankers. I summarise this below, 1. Privatisation. This is actually where national leaders are offered 10% commissions to their secret Swiss bank accounts in exchange for them trimming a few billion dollars off the sale price of national assets. Bribery and corruption, pure and simple. 2. Capital Market Liberalization. This is the repealing any laws that taxes money going over its borders. Stiglitz calls this the, “hot money,” cycle. Initially cash comes in from abroad to speculate in real estate and currency, then when the economy in that country starts to look promising, this outside wealth is pulled straight out again, causing the economy to collapse. The nation then requires International Monetary Fund (IMF) help and the IMF provides it under the pretext that they raise interest rates anywhere from 30% to 80%. This happened in Indonesia and Brazil, also in other Asian and Latin American nations. These higher interest rates consequently impoverish a country, demolishing property values, savaging industrial production and draining national treasuries. 3. Market Based Pricing. This is where the prices of food, water and domestic gas are raised which predictably leads to social unrest in the respective nation, now more commonly referred to as, “IMF Riots.” These riots cause the flight of capital and government bankruptcies. This benefits the foreign corporations as the nations remaining assets can be purchased at rock bottom prices. 4. Free Trade. This is where international corporations burst into Asia, Latin America and Africa, whilst at the same time Europe and America barricade their own markets against third world agriculture. They also impose extortionate tariffs which these countries have to pay for branded pharmaceuticals, causing soaring rates in death and disease.

It is one of the eternal stories that are told about soccer: when Brazil gets knocked out of a World Cup, Brazilians jump off apartment blocks. It can happen even when Brazil wins. One writer at the World Cup in Sweden in 1958 claims to have seen a Brazilian fan kill himself out of “sheer joy” after his team’s victory in the final. Janet Lever tells that story in Soccer Madness, her eye-opening study of Brazilian soccer culture published way back in 1983, when nobody (and certainly not female American social scientists) wrote books about soccer. Lever continues: Of course, Brazilians are not the only fans to kill themselves for their teams. In the 1966 World Cup a West German fatally shot himself when his television set broke down during the final game between his country and England. Nor have Americans escaped some bizarre ends. An often cited case is the Denver man who wrote a suicide note—”I have been a Broncos fan since the Broncos were first organized and I can’t stand their fumbling anymore”—and then shot himself. Even worse was the suicide of Amelia Bolaños. In June 1969 she was an eighteen-year-old El Salvadorean watching the Honduras–El Salvador game at home on TV. When Honduras scored the winner in the last minute, wrote the great Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski, Bolaños “got up and ran to the desk which contained her father’s pistol in a drawer. She then shot herself in the heart.” Her funeral was televised. El Salvador’s president and ministers, and the country’s soccer team walked behind the flag-draped coffin. Within a month, Bolaños’s death would help prompt the “Soccer War” between El Salvador and Honduras.

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for example, had visited the Oval Office in March, and I’d found him impressive. A grizzled, engaging former labor leader who’d been jailed for protesting the previous military government and then elected in 2002, he had initiated a series of pragmatic reforms that sent Brazil’s growth rate soaring, expanded its middle class, and provided housing and education to millions of its poorest citizens. He also reportedly had the scruples of a Tammany Hall boss, and rumors swirled about government cronyism, sweetheart deals, and kickbacks that ran into the billions.

Gradually, the generals and several others, notably Secretary of State Tillerson, would communicate and share strategies for how to manage the sometimes challenging, sometimes downright irrational requests that would come out of the White House. Kori Schake described it this way: “I think what the people, particularly in the Pentagon, did was try and explain to the president and his top aides why things weren’t possible. There’s this beautiful saying in Portuguese. It’s what the Portuguese administrators in the colonies, like Brazil, used to answer when the government in Lisbon would ask them to do something that was undoable, inappropriate: ‘I obey, but I do not comply.’ And that, I think, is a lot of what happened. People weren’t saying, ‘No, I’m not going to pull troops out of Afghanistan.’ What they would say was ‘If we pull troops out of Afghanistan, here are the things that are going to happen. Are you comfortable with those outcomes?’ That’s a lot of how Jim Mattis, for example, handled his relationship with the president.

I intend to open this country up to democracy and anyone who is against that I will jail, I will crush.”—João Baptista Figueiredo, President of Brazil (1979)

1978, October 30 Dedicates the São Paulo Brazil Temple.

WhatsApp user base crosses 70 million in India The total user base for WhatsApp is 600 million, according to a a vice-president of the company. Photo: AFP By PTI | 328 words Mumbai: Mobile messenger service WhatsApp's user base in India has grown to 70 million active users, which is over a 10th of its global users, its business head Neeraj Arora said on Sunday. "We have 70 million active users here who use the application at least once a month," Arora, a vice-president with WhatsApp, said at the fifth annual INK Conference in Mumbai. He said the total user base for the company, which was bought by Facebook in a $19-billion deal earlier this year, is 600 million. With over a 10th of the users from the country, India is one of the biggest markets for WhatsApp, he said, adding connecting billions of people in markets like India and Brazil is the aim of the company. Arora, an alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Delhi and ISB Hyderabad, said WhatsApp will continue to hold a distinct identity even after the takeover by Facebook and will not get merged with the social networking giant. He said WhatsApp, which has only 80 employees, will benefit through learnings from the social networking giant. Arora, who first heard of WhatsApp as a business development executive for the Internet search firm Google Inc. and later joined as its business head, said it took two years to stitch the $19 billion deal announced this April. Interestingly, Arora said he would have paid a fraction of the sum to buy WhatsApp three years back. It would have been in "low tens of million" dollars, he said stressing that the company has grown a lot since then. Arora said the user-base has doubled to 600 million from the 30 million when he joined three years ago. The company has flourished because of its focus on the product, rather than the business side of things, he said. "The founders wanted to develop a cool product which will be used by millions and did not have business things like valuations," he said, stressing that this continues to be a motto of the company.

For those who recall Charlie Hebdo as it really, rankly was, the act of turning its murdered cartoonists into pawns in a game of another kind of public piety—making them martyrs, misunderstood messengers of the right to free expression—seems to risk betraying their memory. Wolinski, Cabu, Honoré: like soccer players in Brazil, each was known in France by a single name. A small irreverent smile comes to the lips at the thought of the flag being lowered, as it was throughout France last week, for these anarchist mischief-makers, and they would surely have roared at the irony of being solemnly mourned and marched for by former President Nicolas Sarkozy and the current President, François Hollande.

SIR – Bello’s comment (November 29th) that “The appointment of a capable economic team is good for Brazil but signals its president’s weakness” reminded me very much of the following quote from Lyndon Johnson: “If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac river, the headline that afternoon would read: ‘President Can’t Swim’.” Robert Hillman Thousand Oaks, California

SO BRAZIL’S PRESIDENT FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO, GERMANY’S Vice Chancellor Joschka Fischer, Sweden’s Lena Hjelm-Wallén, and Chile’s Ricardo Lagos are not just complaining gratuitously from a position of power and privilege. The power of their lofty government jobs is indeed ebbing, and not to the benefit of a particular rival politician or organization that they can counter, buy off, or shut down.

intention, rearing up against a piety. For those who recall Charlie Hebdo as it really, rankly was, the act of turning its murdered cartoonists into pawns in a game of another kind of public piety—making them martyrs, misunderstood messengers of the right to free expression—seems to risk betraying their memory. Wolinski, Cabu, Honoré: like soccer players in Brazil, each was known in France by a single name. A small irreverent smile comes to the lips at the thought of the flag being lowered, as it was throughout France last week, for these anarchist mischief-makers, and they would surely have roared at the irony of being solemnly mourned and marched for by former President Nicolas Sarkozy and the current President, François Hollande.

When the name HILLARY CLINTON popped up on my phone in February 2017, I realized hers was a call I’d stopped waiting to receive. On Election Day, the tradition in politics is that candidates personally thank the people who helped most in the campaign. Win or lose, in the days that follow, the candidate extends that circle of gratitude to members of the party and the donors. Bernie Sanders called me on November 9, 2016, and Joe Biden, too. The vice president even came to our staff holiday party. But I never heard from Hillary.

As I saw it, we had three Democratic parties: the party of Barack Obama, the party of Hillary Clinton, and this weak little vestige of a party led by Debbie that was doing a very poor job getting people who were not president elected. As I saw it, these three titanic egos—Barack, Hillary, and Debbie—had stripped the party to a shell for their own purposes

First I heard from Joe Biden’s chief of staff, asking if I had time to speak with the vice president a little later that day. Gee, I wonder what he wanted to talk to me about? I got an email from Martin O’Malley, whose campaign

learned two things from the students. One was that they disliked identity politics. They thought that Hillary spent too much time trying to appeal to people based on their race, or their gender, or their sexual orientation, and not enough time appealing to people based on what really worried them—issues like income inequality and climate change. The other takeaway was the misogyny of the media, something we had talked about every week in class. And we talked about the Electoral College. And then I finally said to the students, 2016 will be remembered for how the playbook changed on how to run for President.

Ambassadors to Lebanon are invariably career State Department employees, this a glaring exception to the custom wherein lead diplomatic posts are reserved as political appointments, presidents finding places for their deep-pocketed campaign donors, close friends, and Ivy League fraternity brothers. France, England, Sweden, and Brazil—these are the verdant gardens, the well-bought consular A-list. An ambassadorship to Lebanon, on the other hand, lies considerably further down the alphabet. With its magnetism for bombings, kidnappings, and religious-inspired mayhem, Beirut postings are invariably filled—on a strictly volunteer basis—by brave and long-tenured employees from Foggy Bottom.

1980s and declared “I’m very happy to be in Bolivia,” it seemed to confirm all of our worst fears. Nothing stung Brazilian sensibilities more than not being properly recognized by the bigger and much richer continental giant in the hemisphere.

George Bush's father (George H.W. Bush) came in as C.I.A. director the month following the Welch assassination. As Director he presided over the agency as they mounted a campaign throughout western Europe trying to make me appear to be a security threat, a traitor, a Soviet agent, a Cuban agent. All those sorts of things which led to my expulsion from five different NATO countries in the late 1970s. In fact it was all based on lies, and to think that I was responsible for the death of any C.I.A. people for their exposure is absolutely false. No one, as far as I know, of all those people who were exposed as C.I.A. people along with their operations, was ever even harassed or threatened. What happened was, their operations were disrupted and that was the purpose of what we were doing. We were right to do it then because the U.S. policy at the time, executed by the C.I.A., was to support murderous dictatorships around the world as in Vietnam, as in Greece, as in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil; and that's only to name a few. We opposed that use of the U.S. intelligence service for those dirty operations- and I'm talking about regimes now that tortured and disappeared people by the thousands.

World History 101 - The Actual History History is not a record of truth, history is a record of triumph. The triumphant writes history as it fits their narrative - or to be more accurate, history is written by the conquerors for maintaining the supremacy of the conquerors, while the conquered lose everything. Let me give you an example. In a commendable endeavor of goodwill and reparations a descendant of the British conquerors, President Lyndon Johnson started Hispanic Heritage Week, which was later expanded into a month by another white descendant, President Ronald Reagan - fast forward to present time - during the Hispanic Heritage Month the entire North America tries to celebrate Native American history. But there is a glitch - Spanish is not even a Native American language. Native Americans did not even speak Spanish, until the brutes of Spain overran Puerto Rico like pest bearing disease and destruction, after a pathetic criminal called Columbus stumbled upon "La Isabela" in the 1500s. Many of the natives struggled till death to save their home - many were killed by the foreign diseases to which they had no immunity. Those who lived, every last trace of their identity was wiped out, by the all-powerful and glorious spanish colonizers - their language, their traditions, their heritage, everything - just like the Portuguese did in Brazil. The Spaniards would've done the same to Philippines on the other side of the globe, had they had the convenience to stay longer. Heck, even the name Philippines is not the original name - the original name of the islands was (probably) Maniolas, as referred to by Ptolemy. But when the Spaniard retards of the time set foot there, they named it after, then crown prince, later Philip II of Spain. Just reminiscing those abominable atrocities makes my blood boil, and yet somehow, the brutal "glory" of the conquerors lives on as such even in this day and age, as glory that is. That's why José Martí is so important, that's why Kwanzaa is so important, that's why Darna is so important - in the making of a world that has a place for every culture, not just the culture of the conquerors. No other "civilized" people have done more damage to the world than the Europeans, and yet, on the pages of history books their glory of conquest is still packaged as glory, not as atrocity. Why is that? I don't know the answer - do you? Trillions of dollars, pounds and euros in aid won't suffice to undo the damage - but what just might heal those wounds from the past, is if the offspring of the oppressors and the offspring of the oppressed, both hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder, unravel the history as it happened, not as it was presented - what just might heal the scars of yesterday, is if together we come forward to learn about each other's past, so that for the first time in history, we can actually write "human history", not the "conquerors' history" - so that for the first time ever, we write history not as conquerors and conquered, not as oppressors and oppressed, but as one species - as one humankind.

There was just one problem for Putin: Russia wasn’t a superpower anymore. Despite having a nuclear arsenal second only to our own, Russia lacked the vast network of alliances and bases that allowed the United States to project its military power across the globe. Russia’s economy remained smaller than those of Italy, Canada, and Brazil, dependent almost entirely on oil, gas, mineral, and arms exports. Moscow’s high-end shopping districts testified to the country’s transformation from a creaky state-run economy to one with a growing number of billionaires, but the pinched lives of ordinary Russians spoke to how little of this new wealth trickled down. According to various international indicators, the levels of Russian corruption and inequality rivaled those in parts of the developing world, and its male life expectancy in 2009 was lower than that of Bangladesh. Few, if any, young Africans, Asians, or Latin Americans looked to Russia for inspiration in the fight to reform their societies, or felt their imaginations stirred by Russian movies or music, or dreamed of studying there, much less immigrating. Shorn of its ideological underpinnings, the once-shiny promise of workers uniting to throw off their chains, Putin’s Russia came off as insular and suspicious of outsiders—to be feared, perhaps, but not emulated.

I can totally understand why someone in Paris or London or Berlin might not like the president; I don't like the president, either. But don't those people read the newspaper? It's not like Bush ran unopposed. Over 57 million people voted against him. Moreover, half of this country doesn't vote at all; they just happen to live here. So if someone hates the entire concept of America—or even if someone likes the concept of America—based solely on his or her disapproval (or support) of some specific US policy, that person doesn't know much about how the world works. It would be no different that someone in Idaho hating all of Brazil, simply because their girlfriend slept with some dude who happened to speak Portuguese. In the days following the election, I kept seeing links to websites like www(dot)sorryeverybody(dot)com, which offered a photo of a bearded idiot holding up a piece of paper that apologized to the rest of the planet for the election of George W. Bush. I realize the person who designed this website was probably doing so to be clever, and I suspect his motivations were either (a) mostly good or (b) mostly self-serving. But all I could think when I saw it was, This is so pathetic. It's like this guy on this website is actually afraid some anonymous stranger in Tokyo might not unconditionally love him (and for reasons that have nothing to do with either of them)...now I am not saying that I'm somehow happy when people in other countries blindly dislike America. It's just that I'm not happy if they love us, either. I don't think it matters. The kind of European who hates the United States in totality is exactly like the kind of American who hates Europe in totality; both people are unsophisticated, and their opinions aren't valid. But our society will never get over this fear; there will always be people in this country who are devastated by the premise of foreigners hating Americans in a macro sense. And I'm starting to think that's because too many Americans are dangerously obsessed with being liked.

The Left did not regard JK favorably, given his efforts to strengthen a free market economy with participation of foreign capital. Nor was he much admired by the academy that viewed with suspicion his flamboyant democratic attitude, which usually led him to reconcile conflicting forces. My father was a federal deputy at that time, a member of the coalition of parties that supported the government.

As the Harvard historian Kenneth Maxwell observed, “Democracy in Brazil has all too often been seen as the enemy of progress, the harbinger of anarchy, disunion and backwardness.” And so, democracy itself was discarded.

Meanwhile, countries that had actually undergone the dreamed-of socialist revolution— North Korea, Cuba, and East Germany, for example—suffered from sputtering economies and totalitarian regimes. To people who had embraced so-called Marxist dogma during their entire careers, the juxtaposition of these two realities was both puzzling and disturbing.

The primary message of Dependency and Development was that the people of Latin America had control over their own fate. Under certain circumstances, we could indeed operate within the existing system. Many alternatives were possible within that system, and the fatalism that dominated the region at that time was entirely pointless, we wrote. There would, of course, be certain restrictions, and we did not advocate blind free-market capitalism.

What we were really writing about was the beginning of globalization

advocated a blend of free-market reform and social responsibility, much like leaders such as Felipe González, the successful prime minister of Spain. Our party symbol was the toucan, the colorful Brazilian parrotlike bird with a giant beak, and we became popularly known as the tucanos.

Since the beginning of the negotiations, Castro’s instructions had been to be polite as long as the other side was polite, but not to allow insults: “Be very calm, laugh, and smile,” but if the others became offensive, then “put them in their place.” Aldana behaved accordingly. “Cuba would have no problem . . . announcing publicly that the negotiations had deadlocked,” he began. He then went where Ndalu had not dared to go, stressing “the ignorance, the racism and the contradictions” that characterized American society. He said that it was not surprising that in a country whose president mistook Brazil for Bolivia (as Reagan had done) and placed Jamaica in the Mediterranean (another Reagan lapse), the population would not know “what Angola is and what Namibia is.” This was not the kind of language that Crocker was used to hearing.

With the support of leftist intellectuals and the Catholic Church, the MST has become much more than a movement of the poor. It boasts 1.5 million members, including television stars, samba singers, and other celebrities at home and abroad.

To make matters worse, it was clear that small-scale subsistence farming had, sadly, become extremely difficult to maintain in a modern economy. Many of the MST settlements depended on government subsidies to survive. They could wave red Che Guevara flags and rage against the unfairness of global capitalism until they turned hoarse, but that was the reality we all had to live in.

Victory arrived unexpectedly in June 2001, when a UN AIDS conference was due to open in New York. On that same day, the United States withdrew the complaint against Brazil from the WTO. I have no doubt that this favorable outcome was decisively influenced by global public opinion.

If constitutional rules were enough, then figures such as Perón, Marcos, or Brazil’s Getúlio Vargas—all of whom took office under U.S.-style constitutions that, on paper, contained an impressive array of checks and balances—would have been one- or two-term presidents rather than notorious autocrats.

As President Bolsonaro of Brazil put it: “We understand the importance of the Amazon for the world—but the Amazon is ours.